Fiamma Salerno

CURRICULUM VITAE

I studied Medical Biotechnologies at the University of Naples “Federico-II” (Italy), where I obtained my master degree summa cum laude. With an Erasmus scholarship I moved to The Netherlands and soon after I started my PhD-research in the group of Dr. Monika Wolkers at Sanquin in Amsterdam. Here, I discovered how post-transcriptional regulation enables rapid and innate functions of memory CD8 T cells, and contributes to the exhausted phenotype of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes. After graduating cum laude in 2018, I obtained an EMBO long-term fellowship to join the lab of Dr. Martin Turner at the Babraham Institute of Cambridge (UK), where I complemented my wet-lab skills with training in bioinformatics. In 2021 I continued my research in the Turner lab as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow to study how RNA-binding proteins dictate B cell fate decisions that generate long-term immunity. In January 2023, I joined the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) with an NWO-VENI-grant, and later that year I was awarded the 2023 Gisela Thier Fellowship allowing me to launch my independent research group as a tenure-track group leader at the department of Immunology. Together with my team, I aim to elucidate how membrane receptor signaling controls T and B cell fate through regulation of gene expression, with a particular focus on how control of RNA translation programs immune function. My research is further supported by the 2024 LUMC Starter Grant.