Meet Maria Vittoria Mazzuoli, Postdoctoral Researcher
Maria Vittoria is a postdoctoral fellow in the “Synthetic and system biology” laboratory of Prof. Jan-Willem Veening at the University of Lausanne. Her research focuses on the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus, one of the major causes of infectious diseases worldwide. She aims to highlight the genetic requirements and unexplored mechanisms used by this bacterium to infect and survive in the host. Understanding these mechanisms will bring useful knowledge to the treatment of this pathogen, which has been challenged in the past years by the spread of strains resistant to various classes of antibiotics.
More about Maria Vittoria
Maria Vittoria was born in a small town in the very heart of Italy. Her higher education path in Genetics and Molecular Biology started in Rome, and then moved between universities in Rome and Paris. During university studies, she became extremely intrigued by the bacterial world. These very small (-micro!) living organisms with fascinating abilities have a major impact on our everyday life. To learn more about bacteria, Maria Vittoria went to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where she conducted her master’s research and earned her PhD there, as well. Surrounded by some of the most renowned scientist in the microbial world, she became more and more intrigued by this science. Maria Vittoria first investigated the mechanisms of plasmid replication in Vibrio cholerae, and later during her PhD, the regulation of virulence mechanisms in the opportunistic pathogen Streptococcus agalactiae.
