Maria Rita Fumagalli obtained her bachelor and master’s degree cum Laude in Physics at the University of Milan, with a stage in the Genomic Physics Group (Génomique des Microorganismes, UMR) at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. In 2012 she joined the interdisciplinary PhD program of Complex Systems for Life Sciences at the University of Turin, collaborating with biologists, physicians and bioinformaticians.

After a postdoc at the Center for Complexity & Biosystems (University of Milan) and at the Institute of Biophysics at CNR, she joined in 2022 the Multiscale ImmunoImaging Unit of IRCCS Humanitas Research Hospital. Her early research experience mainly concerns the development of statistical mechanics models related to the evolution of biological systems. During her postdocs she worked on models of gene regulatory networks, metabolic networks, cancer progression and on the analysis of genomic and transcriptomic data.  Her close collaboration with experimental groups allowed her to acquire expertise in cell culture, molecular biology techniques and cell imaging. She developed pipelines and custom algorithms for a broad range of application including stochastic simulations and analysis of large datasets of images. (Scopus ID 56404227100; H-index= 6).