A small bag of cells

For most of my life, I knew exactly who I was going to be. I was going to be a doctor. It was the answer I gave to teachers, to friends, to myself. It was so obvious that I never questioned it, and that, I now think, was the problem.

The moment the certainty cracked was quieter than I expected. I was observing in stem cell transplantation and cellular therapy at MD Anderson. I had imagined a CAR-T infusion as something cinematic, a scene from a film about miracles. Instead it was a small bag, an IV line, and a nurse checking a monitor. In a few minutes a patient received their own T cells back: cells taken from their blood, taught in a lab to recognize their cancer, and grown by the millions.

Everyone ‌in ‌that ‌room did a beautiful job. The doctors were so calm and delicate and nice, and I was just absolutely in awe of them. But my mind wasn’t in the room. It was somewhere else, with the people who weren’t in the room, who designed that receptor, who went into battle with the manufacturing protocol for years and years and who counted those cells into the early morning hours, not knowing if any of it was going to be worth anything. I left that room thinking something I couldn’t say. I don’t want to be the one giving this. I want to be the one who makes it. This is the story of how that thought, in my head, a traitor though it may have been, became the most honest thing I could say about myself.

I ‌am ‌Veronese, ‌from the Saval neighborhood, and I attended the Liceo Alle Stimate where I studied classics: Latin, Greek, philosophy, Dante. I loved what I studied but not necessarily where I studied it. I once told a journalist that I felt like an alien at school: the normal teenager’s face but somewhere else. My parents didn’t force me. They let me do whatever I was obsessed with (I was obsessed with a lot of things: ballet, basketball, skiing, tennis, piano, and horses). I applied to Caltech and I came with my mare Deesse, from the fields around Verona to the foot of the California skyline. When a reporter asked me about my schedule, I told her there’s no reason why I should put bounds to my life. I said it as a love letter to life. Now I listen to it as a warning.

Then, during a genetics unit, I read Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies. I fell in love with what I still call the perfect imperfection of DNA ( In italian la perfezione imperfetta del DNA) the same mutations that cause tumors are the engine of evolution. The thing that kills us is the thing that made us. For the first time, my scattered curiosity had a center. I decided I would spend my life fighting cancer. Because I was sixteen, and because nobody had shown me another shape for that wish, fighting cancer meant becoming a doctor. Doctors were the people who stood between the patient and the disease. Scientists, in my imagination, lived somewhere far away, in a building I had never seen.

So I did what a future doctor does, at full speed. I won gold in Anatomy and Physiology at the Biogenesis Olympiad, the most “medical” subject of all. I spent a summer at Harvard studying biology and genetics. I sat entrance exams, wrote around sixty application essays, and got into San Raffaele and Humanitas in Milan, plus eighteen universities in the UK and the US. In October 2024, President Mattarella named me one of the 25 Alfieri del Lavoro, chosen from more than 3,400 students, and L’Arena wrote about the girl who flew home from California for twenty hours just to receive it. Looking back, I notice something about that list. Almost everything on it is something someone else could measure. I was very good at being chosen. I had not yet learned how to choose.

Why limit myself?

I chose Caltech, and I brought my mare Deesse with me, from the fields outside Verona to the California skyline. When a reporter asked about my schedule, I told her I didn’t see why I should put limits on myself. I meant it as a love letter to life. Today I also hear it as a warning.

First year: alarm at six, Uber to the barn, ride, back to campus at seven thirty, classes till four, the lab two days a week, a show jumping competition every other Sunday. Double major Biology and Chemistry with a minor in Neurobiology and, half jokingly, Aerospace engineering minorbecause I was fascinated by biology in space. And I was constructing the pre-med life with the rigor of the person that is checking off boxes: EMR certification, MEDLIFE, mobile clinics, shadowing neurosurgery at Stanford, observing at MD Anderson. I even had a spreadsheet that calculated my AMCAS GPA. I learned clinic lessons that I will never unlearn. As an EMR, I learned that the first minutes are about calm, not brilliance. In mobile clinics, I learned that it’s not the clinic that determines health, it’s water, distance, money and time. In the operating room, I learned what real precision looks like.

I saw something that I didn’t want to see. In clinic, I kept asking questions that were not mine to ask. Why did the tumor come back in the same spot? Why did the treatment work for this patient, but not the other? What would we have to understand so that this surgery is never necessary at all? Around me, the doctors had great answers to the question of what to do next. I always wanted to know why. The moments that I felt most alive were not the moments of care. They were the moments of not knowing. By saying yes to everything, I paid a price that I didn’t want to pay. The price of not asking the only question that mattered: not what I could do, but what I wanted to do.

The bench

My first lab at Caltech was the Dunphy lab, which studies how a cell copies its whole genome exactly once per cycle, and what happens when it fails. Failing to copy DNA correctly is one of the roots of cancer, so I felt close to the question I had fallen for at sixteen. Two afternoons a week I worked on DNA replication. At first, most of what I did didn’t work. And something strange happened: I did not mind. I lost track of time at the bench in a way I never did while shadowing.

Then came structure. In Bil Clemons’s lab I used cryo-EM and LC-MS/MS to study MraY, a membrane enzyme bacteria need to build their walls. It had nothing to do with cancer, and it taught me something essential: a protein has a shape, and the shape is the argument. I worked in nanomedicine with Alessandro Grattoni’s group at Houston Methodist, where they build tiny implantable devices that release drugs slowly inside the body. I did CRISPR work. And I joined Wei Gao’s lab, where we build microrobots that travel to a tumor, deliver a drug and sense what is around them.

None ‌of ‌this ‌looked like medicine. All of it was like the same thing: asking a question nobody had asked before, and getting to be wrong for a while before being right. That one changed me more than any of the results. I was the right answer girl my whole life. School was who I was: the right answer. Being wrong was just this little thing. At the bench, being wrong is the position. Most experiments don’t work. Most hypothesis die. You seperate yourself from the work and focus on what the failed experiment has to say to you instead of what it has to say about you.

At the clinic, your job is to apply the best answer we have, precisely and with humanity. At the bench, we don’t have an answer yet. I wanted to live in the second place, where nobody knows, and where not knowing isn’t failing, it’s an invitation. I learned something about being alone too. The girl who felt like an alien in school found her people in labs: graduate students debating a weird band at nine at night, post-docs getting as excited as I did about a surprising result. I had been wearing a mask without realizing it.

A tube with a number on it

The real turning point was City of Hope, one of the most important Cancer Hospital in the USA and with location in Duarte, in Dr. Stephen Forman’s T cell lab, one of the places where CAR-T therapy has been built and tested for years. My project asks a question that sounds unglamorous and matters enormously: can we grow better CAR-T cells? I compare two bioreactor platforms, G-Rex and Expansify. I activate T cells from healthy donors and from patients, expand them, and read them on a 26-marker spectral flow panel: how many survive, which subsets grow, how exhausted they look by day 14.

Before ‌City ‌of ‌Hope I would have said manufacturing was the boring bit, the bit behind the miracle. Now I know it’s sometimes the miracle itself, or the lack thereof. T cells can be fatigued by chemotherapy. If they don’t expand, no good. If they do, but are too tired, they won’t hang around in the body long enough to do any good. Each percentage point on my plots is somebody in the future who will either have a treatment or won’t. Patient samples come with a unique patient number (UPN), no names, no faces, no stories. Initially this seemed cold, the polar opposite of what I’d signed up for in medicine. Until it wasn’t. I’ve rarely been closer to a patient than when I was trying to make their cells perform better. Because if it works for them, it’s not just for them. It’s for the next patient, and the one after that.

That work became a poster accepted at the AACR Annual Meeting 2027 in Orlando. With Dr. Forman and my colleague Anthony, I am also writing a systematic review and meta-analysis on a question that sounds technical but matters to patients: does the grading system a trial uses change how much neurotoxicity it reports for BCMA-directed CAR-T? Same patients, different ruler, different number. If we can translate between rulers, doctors comparing trials will be comparing the truth. I was asking a doctor’s question with a scientist’s tools. That is when I understood what translational research really is, and that it was what I had been looking for all along.

MD-PhD or PhD

Knowing something and admitting it are two different things. For a long time I tried to keep both doors open. The MD-PhD felt like the responsible compromise: the white coat I had promised myself at sixteen, plus the lab I had fallen in love with at nineteen. I made lists. I computed timelines. Mostly, I avoided the question.

Because the question was not really about degrees. It was about identity. For years, “I want to be a doctor” had been my answer to everything: why I studied so hard, why I left Italy, why I belonged in the rooms I was in. If I was not going to be a doctor, who was I? Underneath that was a quieter fear. Was I abandoning patients? Was choosing the lab a way of choosing comfort over people?

I asked two people whose careers I trust. Mauro Ferrari, one of the founders of nanomedicine, trained in mathematics and engineering and attended medical school, then gave his life to building cancer drugs; he has spoken openly about decades of failures and the medicines that came out of them anyway. Mark Davis, a Caltech chemical engineer, started designing cancer nanoparticles after his wife went through chemotherapy. Neither of them needed to practice medicine to change how cancer is treated. Both had chosen people. They had simply chosen them at a different scale.

I ‌asked ‌them ‌separately, and both of them said the same thing: PhD. It wasn’t advice so much as a statement. Like a good diagnosis, it confirmed what I already suspected without telling me anything I didn’t already know. It was a way of naming me. Most surprising was the sense of relief. I had been expecting sorrow, but instead I felt weightless, as if I had finally stopped lying to someone. Medicine wasn’t my vocation. It was just my career. And when you know better than the person who planned your career, you are free to make a different plan. (The person who planned my career was sixteen. I am thankful to her for getting me here, but she didn’t know what a flow cytometer sounds like at midnight, or what it feels like to be right about something you didn’t expect to be true.)

Choosing the PhD did not make my world smaller. It made it wider, and it immediately tested whether I had really changed. This year I wrote my first sole-author paper, and two more, with the Gao and Forman labs, are under revision. The biggest thing I learned is that the mistakes never stop: in the writing, in the editing, in the data analysis. I have never been prouder of being wrong. At sixteen, being wrong would have felt like losing. Now it feels like the work.

Building bridges and knowing things happen for a reason

The second thing that widened was my sense of what a scientist can build. During my summer at Harvard I had won a startup competition, and I never forgot how it felt to turn an idea into something other people could use.

So when Davide Franchini reached out on LinkedIn with an idea, I said yes. Together we co-founded Young Ventures, a student-led early-stage fund that launched in September 2026 with partners at Stanford, Caltech, NYU, Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, ETH Zurich and Bocconi. I am its Caltech partner. Our bet is simple: students sit closer to labs, researchers and young founders than most investors do, so we can see promising science early.

Sitting ‌face ‌to ‌face with founders you learn what the lab had already told you: discovery is not the end. There is a long, difficult, fragile bridge between a publication and a patient treated with the resulting drug. It is made of manufacturing, trials, reguations, money and believers. The translational scientist has to know the whole bridge, not only the left bank. At sixteen I had thought there were two kinds of people in the war against cancer: those who heal and those who discover. Now I realize there is a third kind, those who build the road between them. I want to discover, but I want to help build the road. Throughout all this I had kept on riding. I took it up around 2019 and pretty quickly it became more than a sport. I had once said it was my personal therapy and I meant it. Whatever I had going on in my head had to be over by the time I got on my horse, because a horse feels everything. When I came to Caltech I founded the equestrian club and nowadays I compete in Grand Prix show jumping, first in Europe and now also in the US.

Horses had already taught me like no one in the lab could, before the lab: you can’t jump if there is no jump. You can prepare, you can build trust, you can improve your stance so you don’t become your partner’s necktie. Currently my trainers are making me keep an upright posture by working on my legs’ strength, which is also a very good comparison to what a PhD is: working on strength where no one can see it so that you can keep balance when it matters. And if you crash a rail, you don’t argue with the rail. You ask the rail what it told you so that you can jump the next fence well.

Deesse, my Didi, was my partner for four years. She crossed the ocean from Italy to California with me and she was for a long time my last thread connecting me to home. In September she flew off to France to become a breeding mare. I hurt more than I thought to see her off. Which was correct. She had carried me as far as she could. It’s the closest thing to letting go of the idea of being a doctor that I can compare it to. Not the loss of something I had failed at, but the end of a chapter that had already achieved what it set out to do. Didi got me to California. The dream of medicine got me to cancer. None of it was meant to be forever.

Today I ride Zeyla Moon, who has just arrived. I think she can carry me to the top levels. Starting fresh with a new partner is humbling. You don’t know each other yet and you have to pay attention more than you talk. Which is also how I want to open the new chapter of my life.

What changed in me

When ‌people ‌ask ‌me what happened, they expect the dramatic answer: a bad night in a hospital, or a professor who changed your mind in one night. There wasn’t a dramatic moment. It was slow. Deep. Let me try to name it.

• I used to compete by how fast I had the right answer. I now compete by the depth of the question I ask. The sentence I’ve learned to say at Caltech is “I don’t know yet,” and the word I want is yet.
• My life was a list of admittees, medals, honors. They meant something to me, they still do. But an admittee is someone else’s take on you. The PhD was the first big choice I made against the rest of my résumé, and it was right, not because it was impressive, but because it was true.
• My paper taught me that the work you dislike is worth more than the work you want. Integrity is not a word you use. Integrity is what you do at 1 a.m. when your data don’t support the title of your paper.
• I used to believe that the only way to care for people was to be with them. I now believe that a tube with a number on it can be an act of caring, because what you learn from it reaches every patient who follows.
• When I was nineteen and talking to a reporter, I said that I didn’t see why I should put limits on myself. I still say yes to life. But a limit is not limiting yourself. A choice is how you become someone in particular.
• The girl who wore the mask at school does not wear it in the lab. I found the place where my weirdness was meant to be: the why of it, the late nights, the pleasure of an unsolved problem.
• I left Italy and then I let go of my last living thread of it. I used to think that meant that I lost my roots. I now think my roots are portable: the Greek and Latin in my head, the classical education that meant learning what a word really meant, the tenacity of the girl from the Saval. I take them with me into every lab.
• Every one of these shifts wasn’t a loss when it happened. Every one of them felt like taking off a coat that didn’t fit me.

My Remedy

What I want now is defined, for the first time, and it’s mine. I want to run a translational cancer lab at a big cancer center, close enough to the clinic that our questions come from patients and our answers return to them via clinical trials. I want to publish a lot and honestly. I want to teach and mentor because I know what it means to show a sixteen-year-old a shape for her ambition that she didn’t know she was missing. This winter I’ll be a student at Cambridge. In a year I’ll apply to PhD programs. I don’t know where I’ll end up, and that doesn’t bother me anymore. Not knowing yet is my new favorite place to begin.

If you’re pre-med because that’s the shape you know for wanting to help people, I’m not telling you to stop. Medicine is one of the most beautiful things you can do with your life, and the doctors I watched did teach me what caring looks like. I’m telling you to look. Spend a summer at the bench. Sit with a question that no one can answer. Pay attention to which rooms make you lose track of time. If the answer surprises you, let it. Medicine needs doctors. Medicine needs people who ensure that the doctors have something new to offer. The Greeks had one word for remedy and poison: phármakon, a reminder that every cure is a balance that somebody first had to discover. Some of us are meant to give the remedy. Some of us are meant to make it.

I used to think I’d spend my life at the bedside. I’ll spend my life one step behind it, making sure that the next small bag of cells works a little better than the last.