Leonardo Elia is junior group leader at Humanitas Research Hospital, where he leads the Vascular Epigenetics Lab, and associate professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Brescia.

Graduated cum laude in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at the University of Bologna in 2001, he received his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” in 2006, with a dissertation on the impact of regulatory T CD4+/CD25+ cells inactivation in cancer vaccination protocols. From 2006 to 2011 he has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California San Diego, working on non-coding RNAs in atherosclerosis and heart failure development under the supervision of Prof. Gianluigi Condorelli. In 2011 he returned in Italy, at Multimedica, in Milan, thanks to a Marie Curie Fellowship granted by the European Commission and in 2015 he moved to Humanitas Research Hospital, where he is now junior group leader. Since 2017 he is also associate professor of molecular biology at the University of Brescia.

Elia’s research interests focus on the study of epigenetics in cardiovascular disease development. This includes studies aimed to identify new molecular mechanisms, including non-coding RNAs, involved in the pathogenesis of heart failure (Both with preserved and not-preserved ejection fraction), atherosclerosis, aneurysm and stenosis, but also cardiovascular complications associated with diabetes. His research has been funded, among other, by the Italian Ministry of Health, the Italian Ministry of University and research, the European Commission and the European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases.