Alessandra Chesi recently joined the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Division of Experimental Pathology, as well as the Penn Neurodegeneration Genomics Center. Alessandra joins us from CHOP where, from 2013-2020, she was a Bioinformatic Specialist in Struan Grant’s lab and the Center for Spatial and Functional Genomics.
Before joining CHOP, Alessandra worked in the laboratory of Aaron Gitler at Stanford University as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a Research Associate. Alessandra received her PhD from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS), Trieste, Italy, and from 2008-2011 she was a postdoctoral fellow in Cell and Developmental Biology at Penn. She has won a number of prestigious awards and is a member of the American Society for Bone Mineral Research, the American Society for Human Genetics and the Alzheimer’s Association International Society to Advance Alzheimer’s Research and Treatment.
Alessandra’s work at Penn will focus on the use of functional genomics and systems biology approaches to identify genes that influence disease risk and that determine who will get a genetics-based disease. She will apply transformative technologies to gain insights into the regulation and identity of genes involved in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Alessandra’s research fits nicely with the University of Pennsylvania Alzheimer’s Disease Genetics consortium (PI Schellenberg) which uses GWAS and DNA sequencing methods to identify new risk loci, and the Genome Center for Alzheimer’s Disease (PI Wang and Schellenberg) which analyzes large scale DNA sequence data sets for AD locus/gene discovery.