Ilaria Rao is a MEM (Molecular and Experimental Medicine) PhD student at Humanitas University, under the supervision of Dr. Marianna Paulis.  She graduated in Medical, Veterinary Pharmaceutical, Biotechnologies in 2020 at University of Parma.  During her thesis internship, she worked on a project based on induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) maintenance and iPSC cardiac differentiation.

Her experience was consolidated during the two pre-doc years, when she worked as a research fellow in a project based on generation and characterization of iPSCs derived from a pig Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis model. Now, her main project is based on iPSCs from human Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and their correction by chromosome transplantation, which is a novel approach of gene correction defined as the perfect replacement of the endogenous defective chromosome with an exogenous normal one, restoring a correct diploid karyotype.