Initially from Catania, Sicily, she obtained a BSc in Canterbury and a Randall PhD (2009, supervisor Rob Evans) in which she studied how iron binds to the Hepcidin peptide hormone. She went on to learn cryo-EM during postdocs with Tom Walz in Harvard and Remi Fronzes in the Pasteur Institute, where she did landmark work on the structure of the type VI secretion system, a harpoon-like molecular machine involved in bacterial competition. She now leads the cryo-EM group at Sanofi (Paris), a major pharmaceutical company.