Elena Dalla Benetta

Elena Dalla Benetta is a Postdoctoral research fellow in the Akbari lab, in the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. She received her B.S (2011) and M.S. (2013) in Molecular Biology at the University of Padova, Italy, and her PhD (2018) at University of Groningen, the Netherlands within the Marie Curie Initial Training Network “INsecTIME”. During Dr. Dalla Benetta’s training she started developing a keen focus on research that involves insect molecular biology. As a PhD student, she studied the genetic basis of seasonal adaptation in a non-canonical insect species Nasonia Vitripennis and started implementing gene editing tools to facilitate functional studies of jewel wasps. As a postdoctoral fellow (July 2018-December 2020) in the Ferree lab and in collaboration with the Akbari lab she studied the mechanism of genome elimination by selfish chromosomes in Nasonia vitripennis. She identified the gene Haploidizer as the major gene responsible for female-to-male conversion by destroying the sperm’s hereditary material in young embryos. In January 2021 Elena moved her research focus on developing novel CRISPR-based gene editing tools in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Additionally, Elena is very interested in synthetic biology involving novel CRISPR technologies and their wider application in the life science sector.