I graduated in pharmaceutical chemistry (Master's degree) at the University of Bologna in 1998. After a year spent as a junior fellow at the Istituto Mario Negri, I joined the group of Peer Bork at the EMBL in Heidelberg. There, I worked in comparative genomics and phylogenetics. I earned my PhD in Natural Science at the University of Heidelberg in 2003, and I stayed as a postdoctoral fellow in the Bork group until 2005. I then moved to Milan to establish my own research group at the European Institute of Oncology (IEO). At IEO, my group developed a systems-level approach to study cancer genes and also started to produce and analyze high throughput cancer genomic data. In 2014, I joined King's College London as Associate Professor (Reader) in Cancer Genomics and Bioinformatics. From 2015, I coordinated the Quantitative Genomics, Epigenomics, and Biobank Programme in the Division of Cancer Studies at King's. I was appointed as Professor of Cancer Genomics at King's College London in 2018. I moved to the Barts Cancer Institute at Queen Mary University of London in 2023 where I now lead the Centre for Cancer Genomics and Computational Biology. I have also been a seconded group leader at the Francis Crick Institute since 2017, and I continue to hold a lab there.