ROSSELLA LABARILE

Rossella Labarile holds a degree in Biotechnology. Her thesis research project was conducted at Cornell University, Department of Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology, New York State Agricultural Experiment Station (Geneva, NY, USA). She attended a post-graduate programme for “Manager of Eco-sustainability processes of food productions". She received her PhD in Biodiversity, Agriculture and Environment, curricula: Protection of crops at University of Bari in 2019. Her doctoral thesis aims at investigating the RNAi-based response of the phytopathogenic oomycetes Phytophthora infestans to the infection of the plant virus Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). She was experienced in molecular techniques including: DNA/RNA extraction, primer design, PCR, gel electrophoresis, DNA sequencing, molecular cloning and RNA-seq. She worked at the University of Bari as Post-Doc Researcher at Chemistry Department in the research group of Professor G. M. Farinola financed by the European project H2020-FETOPEN-1-2016-2017 - Hybrid Electronics based on Photosynthetic Organism (HyPhOE) SSD: CHIM/06 CHIM/02. Her research activity focuses on the development of hybrid bioelectronic systems based on photosynthetic organisms with the challenging aspect to improve the electronic communication between abiotic electrodes and the purple non-sulfur bacterium Rhodobacter sphaeroides by the use of conductive polymers. 

Currently, she works at National Research Council (CNR-Istituto per I Processi Chimico-Fisici) in the research group of Dr. M. Trotta financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation: Sinergia in the project “Photosynthetic bacteria in Self-assembled Biocompatible coatings for the transduction of energy” (Phosbury) for engineering microbes capable of biopolymerizing their own inter-and intra-cellular conductive network. 

Rossella is the author of over 10 scientific articles, a book chapter, and she is the co-organizer of the Symposium SB08: Bioinspired and Biological Polymers—From Living Organisms to Sustainable Functional Materials in Photonics, Electronics and Biology at 2022 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston (MA).