ITALIAN SCIENTISTS & SCHOLARS IN NORTH AMERICA FOUNDATION
Connecting, Empowering, Celebrating the Italian Intellectual Diaspora
ISSNAF confers the Young Investigator Awards every year to outstanding, early career Italian researchers who work in the United States or Canada in recognition of their significant and innovative contributions to their field of study.
Three finalists for each of the Award were selected from the applicant pool. They presented their work to the distinguished Award Juries at the Award Symposia.
The winners were announced at the ISSNAF Annual Event 2022 on November 7 at the Embassy of Italy in Washington DC.
Warmest congratulations to the 2022 winners and finalists on their achievement!
EMBASSY OF ITALY AWARD
FOR RESEARCH IN FOOD EQUITABILITY
Established in 2020, this year’s edition recognizes young Italian researchers in the USA providing fundamental contributions to agriculture, food quality and security with the broader goals of reducing poverty, fighting climate change and improving human health. Research in the specific fields of agricultural and industrial innovation, data science, sensing, economics, human health, environmental sciences and engineering are within the scope of the award.
Winner
Dr. Salvatore Calabrese, Texas A&M University
Finalists
Dr. Cristian Cassella, Northeastern University
Dr. Lorenzo Rosa, Carnegie Institution for Science
Award Chair
Prof. Gabriele Villarini, University of Iowa
Jury
Prof. Gabriele Villarini, University of Iowa
Prof. Paola Passalacqua, University of Texas Austin
Prof. Marta Tuninetti, Politecnico di Torino
FRANCO STRAZZABOSCO AWARD
FOR RESEARCH IN ENGINEERING WITH FOCUS ON SUSTAINABLE ENERGY
Established in 2013 by the Strazzabosco family in memory of Dott. Ing. Franco Strazzabosco, this award is a tribute to the entrepreneurial courage of Italian engineers who strive to apply scientific discoveries to the public advantage.
Winner
Dr. Bartolomeo Stellato, Princeton University
Finalists
Dr. Luigi Osmieri, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Dr. Francesca Parise, Cornell University
Award Chair
Prof. Alberto Salleo, Stanford University
Jury
Prof. Simone D’Amico, Stanford University
Dr. Emanuele Francesco Pecora, U.S. Dept of Energy
Prof. Alberto Salleo, Stanford University
INFN BRUNO TOUSCHEK AWARD
FOR RESEARCH IN ELEMENTARY PARTICLE PHYSICS
Established in 2022 by Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, this award honors the memory of Prof. Bruno Touschek for his pioneering work in the fields of elementary particle physics and particle accelerators. It recognizes contributions in these fields as well as cosmology.
Winner
Dr. Claudio Emma, SLAC National Laboratory
Finalists
Dr. Fabio Ravera, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Dr. Marco Siciliano, Argonne National Laboratory
Award Chair
Prof. Claudio Pellegrini, SLAC National Laboratory
Jury
Prof. Giorgio Gratta, Stanford University
Prof. Pietro Musumeci, University of California Los Angeles
Prof. Tommaso Treu, University of California Los Angeles
MARIO GERLA AWARD
FOR RESEARCH IN COMPUTER SCIENCE
Established by the Gerla family in 2019 in memory of Dr. Mario Gerla, professor of Computer Science at UCLA and ISSNAF founding member.
Winner
Dr. Michele Polese, Northeastern University
Finalists
Dr. Marzia Cremona, Université Laval
Award Chair
Prof. Elisa Bertino, Purdue University
Jury
Prof. Elisa Bertino, Purdue University
Prof. Gesualdo Scutari, Purdue University
Prof. Anna Cinzia Squicciarini, Penn State
PAOLA CAMPESE AWARD
FOR RESEARCH IN HEMATOLOGIC MALIGNANCIES
Established by Stefania and Vito Campese in 2011 in memory of their young, talented and generous daughter Paola.
Winner
Giulia Biancon, Yale School of Medicine
Finalists
Dr. Annamaria Gullà, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School
Dr. Francesco Maura, University of Miami and Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center
Award Chair
Prof. Riccardo Dalla-Favera, Columbia University
Jury
Prof. Riccardo Dalla-Favera, Columbia University
Prof. Federico Caligaris Cappio, AIRC
Prof. Simona Colla, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
RnB4CULTURE AWARD
FOR INNOVATION IN THE STUDY OF ITALIAN CULTURE
Established in 2021 by RnB4Culture, this award recognizes the vibrancy of research in Italian culture and its evolving nature expressed in a variety of ways such as innovative uses of technology, or originality of approach, or contribution to wider questions and trends in the Humanities at large.
Winner
Dr. Camilla Hawthorne, University of California, Santa Cruz
Award Chair
Prof. Claudio Fogu, University of California Santa Barbara
Jury
Prof. Claudio Fogu, University of California Santa Barbara
Prof. Graziella Parati, Dartmouth University
Prof. Pamela Ballinger, University of Michigan
WINNERS & FINALISTS
EMBASSY OF ITALY AWARD FOR RESEARCH IN FOOD EQUITABILITY
Salvatore
Calabrese
WINNER
Salvatore Calabrese received his bachelor’s degree in 2012 and master’s degree in 2014 at the University of Palermo (Italy), and his Ph.D. in 2019 at Princeton University (NJ, USA) with a thesis on the impact of multiscale ecohydrological fluctuations on biogeochemical cycles. In 2020, he joined as an Assistant Professor the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department at Texas A&M University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses in water resources and leads a research group focused on Hydrology and Ecosystem Sustainability (http://people.tamu.edu/~salvatore.calabrese/). Research in his lab addresses critical environmental challenges arising from the effects of climatic changes and land management practices on the hydrologic and nutrient cycles, and their impacts on soil and water resources. Salvatore and his team adopt a multidisciplinary approach seamlessly integrating hydrology, biology, biogeochemistry, and thermodynamics as well as mathematical modeling to develop innovative sustainable land management strategies, with a specific focus on water use and soil carbon sequestration. Research findings from the group have been highlighted by the US National Academy of Sciences and featured in several local and international news outlets. As a member of the American Geophysical Union, Salvatore regularly chairs scientific sessions at professional meetings and serves as a member of the Soil Processes and Critical Zone Technical committee.
Cristian
Cassella
FINALIST
Cristian Cassella is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Northeastern University, Boston (USA). He received his B.S.E. and M.Sc., with honors, at University of Rome – Torvergata in 2006 and 2009, respectively. In 2011, he was a visiting scholar at University of Pennsylvania. In 2012 he entered a Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon University which he completed in 2015. In 2015 he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Northeastern University. In 2016, he became Associate Research Scientist. He is author of 90 publications in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. Two of his peer-reviewed journal papers published on the IEEE Journal of MicroElectroMechanical systems (JMEMS) were selected as papers of excellent quality (JMEMS RightNowPapers), hence being released as open-access. One of his journal papers was chosen as the cover for the Nature Nanotechnology October 2017 issue. Another one of his journal papers was selected as a featured article by the Applied Physics Letters magazine. He won the best paper award as a student at the IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium (2013). Two of his advised students won the best paper award at the IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium (2021 and 2022). In 2018, he was awarded by the European Community (EU) the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. In 2021, he was recipient of the NSF CAREER Award. He holds five patents and four patent applications in the area of remote sensing, acoustic resonators and RF systems. He is a technical reviewer for several journals, such as Applied Physics Letter, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasound, Ferroelectric and Frequency Control, IEEE Journal of MicroElectroMechanical devices, IEEE Electron Device Letter, Journal of Micromachine and Micro-Engineering, Journal of Applied Physics, IEEE Sensors Letter and Review of Scientific Instruments.
Lorenzo
Rosa
FINALIST
Lorenzo Rosa is a Principal Investigator in the Department of Global Ecology at Carnegie Institution for Science and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth System Science at Stanford University. Prior to joining Carnegie, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Energy and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Science from the University of California Berkeley, and a B.S. and M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Politecnico di Milano. Lorenzo grew up in the lush mountainous pre-alpine region around Lake Como in Italy, his childhood past-time was exploring the landscape with his younger brother discovering new paths to reach the top of the mountains.
His research aims to assess the potential benefits and unintended climate and environmental consequences of innovations engineered to satisfy the increasing global demands for energy, water, and food. He studies climate change mitigation and adaptation solutions to food, energy, and water systems. His current work is focusing on solutions to water and food security under global warming, solutions to achieve net-zero emissions in agriculture, and environmental implications of climate mitigation technologies.
Dr. Rosa was awarded the 2019 AGU Horton Hydrology Research grant and the 2021 AGU Science for Solutions Award. He was also listed among the most influential young leaders in Science and Technology of 2020 by Forbes 30 Under 30.
FRANCO STRAZZABOSCO AWARD
FOR RESEARCH IN ENGINEERING WITH FOCUS ON SUSTAINABLE ENERGY
Bartolomeo
Stellato
WINNER
Bartolomeo Stellato is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Operations Research Center. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford as part of the Marie Curie EU project TEMPO. He holds a M.Sc. in Robotics, Systems and Control from ETH Zürich and a B.Sc. in Automation Engineering from Politecnico di Milano. He is the developer of OSQP, which is one of the most widely used software in mathematical optimization. Bartolomeo Stellato is the recipient of the 2022 INFORMS Computing Society Student Paper Award (as advisor), the 2021 Innovation Award from the Princeton School of Engineering and Applied Science, the 2020 Best Paper Award in Mathematical Programming Computation, the 2020 INFORMS Pierskalla Best Paper Award, and the 2017 First Place Prize Paper Award in IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics. His research focuses on data-driven computational tools for mathematical optimization, machine learning, and optimal control.
Luigi
Osmieri
FINALIST
Luigi Osmieri is currently a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He received the B.Sc. (Laurea), M.Sc. (Laurea Specialistica) and Ph.D. (Dottorato di Ricerca) in chemical engineering from the Politecnico di Torino, Italy. The topic of his Ph.D. research was the development and testing of precious metal-free electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reaction with application to low temperature fuel cells. After graduating, he worked as a research assistant at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) and at the Politecnico di Torino. In 2017 he moved to the U.S.A. to join the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (Golden, Colorado) as a postdoctoral researcher, where he was awarded with the “Department of Energy Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office’s Postdoctoral Recognition Award” (runner-up). In 2020 he joined Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos, New Mexico), where he was awarded with the prestigious Director’s Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Dr. Osmieri’s main research interest is the development of precious metal-free catalysts for oxygen reduction, oxygen evolution and hydrogen evolution reactions. His research also involves electrode engineering and electrochemical diagnostics, with application to electrochemical energy conversion devices such as polymer electrolyte fuel cells, low temperature water electrolyzers and CO2 electrolyzers. He is the author of 35 publications, with more than 1300 citations and an H-index of 23.
Francesca
Parise
FINALIST
Francesca Parise joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University as an assistant professor in July 2020. Before then, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. She defended her PhD at the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich, in 2016 and she received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees (summa cum laude) in Information and Automation Engineering in 2010 and 2012, respectively, from the University of Padova in Italy, where she simultaneously attended the Galilean School of Excellence.
Francesca’s research interests include the identification, analysis, and control of complex multi-agent systems, with applications to transportation, energy, social and economic networks. Specifically, Francesca’s recent work focuses on developing novel mathematical models and automation techniques to enable sustainable smart city technology in interconnected networked environments, with specific focus on the increasingly important role that human decision-making plays within such physical and technological infrastructures.
Francesca has co-authored over 35 peer-reviewed scientific contributions and has given over 40 invited talks and seminars. She was recognized as an EECS rising star in 2017 and is the recipient of the C3.ai COVID-19 Award, the Guglielmo Marin Award from the “Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti”, the SNSF Early Postdoc Fellowship, the SNSF Advanced Postdoc Fellowship and the ETH Medal for her doctoral work.
INFN BRUNO TOUSCHEK AWARD
FOR RESEARCH IN ELEMENTARY PARTICLE PHYSICS
Claudio
Emma
WINNER
Is a research scientist at SLAC National Laboratory with specific expertise in particle accelerators and free electron lasers. He is versed in computational modeling of dynamical systems and proficient in analysis and manipulation of data from computer simulations and experiments. His recent work has focused on using plasma-based particle accelerators to drive X-ray light sources and applying AI to improve the performance and scientific throughput of particle accelerator facilities.
Education:
University of California Los Angeles, Ph.D. 2017 in Accelerator Physics
Imperial College London, UK, M.Sc. 2012 in Physics, with Distinction
King’s College London, B.Sc. 2011 in Physics, with a year abroad, recipient of Nelkon prize (awarded to the top physics student in the graduating class)
Appointments:
2021 – present Associate Staff Scientist, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
2017 – 2021 Research Associate, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
2016 – 2017 Technical Consultant, RadiaBeam Technologies
2012 – 2017 Graduate Student Researcher, UCLA Particle Beam Physics Laboratory
Summer 2010 Undergraduate Research Assistant, UCLA Particle Beam Physics Lab
Summer 2009 Undergraduate Research Assistant, King’s College London
Fabio
Ravera
FINALIST
Fabio Ravera obtained his master’s degree in Physics from the University of Turin in 2013 with a thesis on 3D silicon pixel detectors, which was awarded the “Anna Piccotti” INFN Torino Award for the best master thesis on particle detectors. As a graduate student at the University of Turin, Fabio deployed the acquired expertise in the construction of the CMS-TOTEM Precision Proton Spectrometer (CT-PPS) tracker with 3D pixel detectors. In 2017 he moved to CERN as a Cooperation Associate to follow the installation of the detector and obtained his Ph.D.. He then obtained a postdoctoral position at the University of Genoa and continued working as a CERN Cooperation Associate in the CT-PPS project as responsible for the data taking of the tracking detector until 2018. Fabio received the CMS Achievement Award and the IEEE Emilio Gatti and Franco Manfredi Best Ph.D. Thesis Award in Radiation Instrumentation thanks to the activities carried out. In 2018, Fabio moved to the United States for a Fermilab Research Associate position. His research focused on searches for new physics in multi-Higgs boson final states and the CMS Phase II Outer Tracker Upgrade. For this work, Fabio received the “Fermilab Reward and Recognition award” and become a Distinguished Researcher at the CMS LHC Physics Center in 2021. In 2021, he was appointed as Associate Scientist at Fermilab and he is continuing his research and becoming responsible for the CMS Outer Tracker module production at Fermilab.
Marco
Siciliano
FINALIST
Marco Siciliano obtained his Bachelor and Master degrees at the University of Padova (Italy). For the Master’s thesis he worked at the University of Jyväskylä, where he was introduced to the study of nuclear structure of very exotic nuclei. During the Ph.D., Marco worked at the INFN-Legnaro National Laboratories (Italy), becoming an expert of gamma-ray spectroscopy and of state-of-the-art HPGe arrays, such as GALILEO and AGATA. When he moved to CEA-Saclay (France), Dr. Marco Siciliano developed his interest in nuclear shapes and their relationship with nuclear interactions. Now Dr. Marco Siciliano works as Assistant Physicist at the Physics Division of Argonne National Laboratory, USA. Here he is the responsible for the GRETINA experimental campaign, and recently he has been designing a new generation heavy-ion detector to study nuclear shapes. Marco’s research activities have been conducted in various European and North American laboratories. His research can be placed in a general context of experimental nuclear structure studies, by addressing timely topics in nuclear structure physics via combine gamma-ray and particle spectroscopy and also by investigating the influence of the nuclear structure on reaction mechanisms. Particularly, his work has mainly been devoted to the investigation of exotic neutrondeficient nuclei and the structure evolution in the Z=50 region.
MARIO GERLA AWARD
FOR RESEARCH IN COMPUTER SCIENCE
Michele
Polese
WINNER
Michele Polese is a Principal Research Scientist at the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things, Northeastern University, Boston, since March 2020. He received his Ph.D. at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova in 2020. He also was an adjunct professor and postdoctoral researcher in 2019/2020 at the University of Padova, and a part-time lecturer in Fall 2020 and 2021 at Northeastern University. During his Ph.D., he visited New York University (NYU), AT&T Labs in Bedminster, NJ, and Northeastern University.
His research interests are in the analysis and development of protocols and architectures for future generations of cellular networks (5G and beyond), in particular for millimeter-wave and terahertz networks, spectrum sharing and passive/active user coexistence, open RAN development, and the performance evaluation of end-to-end, complex networks. He has contributed to O-RAN technical specifications and submitted responses to multiple FCC and NTIA notice of inquiry and requests for comments, and is a member of the Committee on Radio Frequency Allocations of the American Meteorological Society (2022-2024). He collaborates and has collaborated with several academic and industrial research partners, including AT&T, Mavenir, NVIDIA, InterDigital, NYU, University of Aalborg, King's College, and NIST. He is co-PI in research projects on 6G funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and Office for Undersecretary of Defense (OUSD), and was awarded several best paper awards. Michele is serving as TPC co-chair for WNS3 2021-2022, as an Associate Technical Editor for the IEEE Communications Magazine, as a Guest Editor in an IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Open RAN, and has organized the Open 5G Forum in Fall 2021.
Valeria
Barra
FINALIST
Born in Naples, and raised in the rolling hills of Siena, in the beautiful Tuscany region, Dr. Barra earned her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Mathematical Sciences from the University of Siena, Italy. At the end of her Master's program, Dr. Barra won a fellowship that awarded her a full-ride scholarship for one year at the New Jersey Institute of Technology for study and research. After her exchange program, Dr. Barra pursued a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at the same host institution, from which she graduated in 2018. During her Ph.D. program, Dr. Barra also took the opportunity to gain industrial research experience, by joining the research team at Pixar Animation Studios, in Emeryville, California for a research internship. Shortly after gaining her Ph.D., Dr. Barra joined the University of Colorado at Boulder as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. She worked in the Center for Efficient Exascale Discretizations, a co-design center within the U.S. Exascale Computing Project (ECP). The effort of this co-design center is to prepare efficient software products capable of exploiting the heterogeneous architectures of the current and nextgeneration exascale supercomputers. Since October 2020, Dr. Barra has worked at Caltech, in the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA), a coalition of scientists, engineers, and applied mathematicians from Caltech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that leverages recent advances in the computational and data sciences to build a novel climate model. CliMA aims at providing the accurate and actionable scientific information needed to face the current and coming climate changes and mitigate public safety risks
Marzia Angela
Cremona
FINALIST
Dr. Marzia Angela Cremona is an assistant professor in data science in the Department of Operations and Decision Systems at Université Laval (Canada), and a researcher at the CHU de Québec – Université Laval research center. She obtained a Ph.D. in Mathematical Models and Methods for Engineering from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 2016, and she joined Université Laval in 2019 after spending almost four years at the Pennsylvania State University (US).
Her research interests focus on machine learning methods for the analysis of large, high-dimensional and complex data and their application to computational biology and “Omics” sciences. In particular, she is interested in developing statistically sound and computationally efficient tools for the analysis of functional data, i.e., data that can be represented as curves.
Marzia has published 17 peer-reviewed scientific articles in top bioinformatics, statistics and genomics journals and has given more than 50 oral presentations, of which 25 as an invited speaker. She is the recipient of the research medal awards 2020, 2021 and 2022from her university, as well as of the CFE-CMStatistics Early Career Investigator Award 2017 and the ERC IASC Young Researcher Award 2022, among others. Marzia’s research is currently funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
PAOLA CAMPESE AWARD
FOR RESEARCH IN HEMATOLOGIC MALIGNANCIES
Giulia
Biancon
WINNER
My strong commitment to blood cancer research started 9 years ago in Prof. Paolo Corradini’s Hematology Laboratory at Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori (Milan, Italy). During my Master’s thesis, I investigated the efficacy of drug combinations in peripheral T-cell lymphomas. During my Ph.D. I focused on the study of multiple myeloma, applying next-generation sequencing approaches to assess the role of liquid biopsy in disease monitoring and to identify prognostic markers dissecting the genomic landscape [Biancon G, et al. 2018; Ziccheddu B, Biancon G, et al. 2020]. For my postdoctoral training, I was excited to have the opportunity to investigate myeloid malignancies and RNA biology in the Halene Lab at Yale University School of Medicine (New Haven, CT, USA). Specifically, I demonstrated that mutations in the splicing factor U2AF1, through RNA binding and splicing changes, determine increased stress granule formation in myelodysplastic syndromes and acute myeloid leukemia [Biancon G, et al. 2022]. Alterations in stress granules, and possibly in other biomolecular condensates, may represent a unifying strategy deployed by splicing factor-mutant cells to promote their clonal advantage and, therefore, a novel therapeutic vulnerability. Throughout these years, I established several collaborations in the RNA field, as organizer of the Yale Center for RNA Science and Medicine, and in the fight against blood cancers and COVID-19 [Li P*, Biancon G*, et al. 2021; Kim D*, Biancon G*, et al. 2022]. My long-term career goal is to lead a research team focused on hematological malignancies where molecular and computational biology combine to improve patient care.
Francesco
Maura
FINALIST
Francesco is an Assistant Professor and co-PI of the Myeloma Computational and Translational Laboratory at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center/University of Miami. After completing his residency in Hematology at the University of Milan in 2016, Francesco spent 3 years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Cancer, Ageing and Somatic Mutation Programme at Wellcome Sanger Institute, directed by Peter J. Campbell. During this experience, Francesco gained research skills in cancer genomics with a focus in analysis of whole genome and whole exome sequencing data. Furthermore, he carried out several genomic investigations focused on identifying key mutational processes active in cancer (i.e., mutational signatures) and reconstructing the genomic life history of lymphoproliferative disorders. In 2019 he was hired as faculty at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York to initiate a multiple myeloma genomic laboratory together with Dr. Ola Landgren. First at MSKCC and now at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, Francesco's lab has integrated clinical and genomic data via computational modeling to better characterize the pathogenesis and (sub)clonal evolution of multiple myeloma and precursor conditions. Furthermore, Francesco's team has extensively worked in deciphering the mechanisms of tumor escape to novel emerging immunotherapies in lymphoproliferative disorders (e.g., CAR-T and bispecific antibodies). Finally, Francesco has also investigated which mutational processes are involved in the pathogenesis of lymphoproliferative disorders (i.e., multiple myeloma, aggressive B-cell lymphomas, and Hodgkin lymphomas), and how exposure to chemotherapy promotes the development of secondary malignancies.
Annamaria
Gullà
FINALIST
Annamaria Gullà, MD, is an oncologist and Group Leader at the Candiolo Cancer Institute FPO - I.R.C.C.S. in Italy. She is a physician-scientist with a strong expertise in experimental hemato-oncology with primary focus on multiple myeloma. She earned her MD degree and completed her clinical/research fellowship in Medical Oncology at the Magna Graecia University of Catanzaro (Italy). She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston (U.S.) where she was promoted as junior faculty and Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Gullà research focuses on the mechanisms of anticancer immune-surveillance and on the role of immunogenic chemotherapy in multiple myeloma. She has a record of accomplished and productive research projects, resulting in several publications in international peer-reviewed journals. Her works have been highlighted at several international meetings including the annual meetings of the American Society of Hematology (ASH) and the International Myeloma Society. Her projects were also funded by competitive career development awards including the ASH Fellow to Faculty Scholar Award (2020-2022) and Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Career Development Program Award (2019-2022).
RnB4CULTURE AWARD
FOR INNOVATION IN THE STUDY OF ITALIAN CULTURE
Camilla
Hawthorne
WINNER
Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a faculty affiliate of the UC Santa Cruz Science & Justice Research Center and the Legal Studies Program. Camilla also serves as Programme Director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She is co-editor of the 2021 volume The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and the author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022). Contesting Race and Citizenship explores the ways that citizenship has emerged as a key terrain of struggle over racial nationalism in Italy, and—bringing together insights from critical migration/citizenship studies and Black studies—argues that citizenship is crucial for understanding how racism and race are being reconfigured in the twenty-first century. In 2020, she was named as one of the national Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera‘s 110 "Women of the Year" for her work on the Black diaspora in Italy, and in 2021 she was a recipient of the Leonardo Humanities Award by the Leonardo Da Vinci Society and the Bay Area chapter of ISSNAF.