Francesca is a staff researcher at the Laboratory of Biomedical Technologies of ENEA since December 2012. She graduated with honors in Biology from  “La Sapienza” University (Rome) and got the Ph.D. from the “Roma Tre” University (Rome). She was researcher at the “Ionising Radiation Biophysics Unit” of  the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Rome) and was visiting researcher at the “Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (BNL)”, Berkeley, USA (2000-2001), at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, NY, USA (2001) and at National Institute of Radiological Sciences, Chiba, Japan (2001).
During her studies Francesca developed strong interest in radiation induced DNA damage and repair processes (and relevance in inducing biological end-points), radiation biophysics, charged particle therapy and cosmic radiation, studying the effects of ionizing radiation on in vitro human and mammal cells. More recently, the key focus of the research programme at ENEA, was to broaden the current understanding of the effects on health caused by low doses of ionizing radiation using experimental animal and cellular models.