I was born near Venice, Italy and earned my undergraduate degree in Medical Biotechnology at the University of Padova, Italy. I the obtained my PhD with Marina Cavazzana at the Hopital Necker of Paris, France (2004-2009) where I first got exposed to the beautiful complexity of the hematopoietic system. After hearing Gordon Keller speaking at a Keystone Meeting, I was totally blown away about using pluripotent stem cells to model human development. And I then moved for my post-doc in Toronto to join his lab at the McEwen Institute for Regenerative Medicine (2009-2016). In November 2016, I started as a Group Leader of the “Human hematopoietic development and disease modeling unit” at the San Raffaele – Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy in Milan (Italy) in November 2016, where I focus on a research program integrating developmental cell and molecular biology. Our overarching research goal is to understand and recapitulate how blood cells are formed during human hematopoietic development, and decipher the sequence of events that regulates both stemness and lineage choices during the hematopoietic commitment. We want to use this knowledge to generate blood cell products with improved functionality usable in a regenerative medicine framework.