Affiliation: Department of Life Sciences, Centre for Regenerative Medicine University of Modena and Reggio Emilia via Gottardi 100 Modena , Italy

Dr. Daniela Benati received her M. Sc. in Pharmaceutical biotechnology from the University of Bologna. She earned her PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Siena in 2009, working in the laboratory of Prof. Cosima Tatiana Baldari, where she described the immunomodulatory activities of statins on antigen presenting cells. In 2010, she joined the group of Dr. Lisa Chakrabarti at the Pasteur Institute as a postdoctoral fellow. During her 4-year postdoc she identified high avidity HIV-specific TCRs, which she transferred, via lentiviral vectors, to healthy donor T cells to induce efficient anti-HIV responses, thus providing important tools for the development of immunotherapeutic approaches for a functional cure of HIV infection. Since 2015 she has been senior postdoc at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia working in the laboratory of Dr. Alessandra Recchia. Her research interests cover the development of gene therapy strategies for the correction of genetic mutations causing monogenic disorders. She focuses on the employment of viral and non-viral methods to optimize the delivery of gene editing tools, such as CRISPR/Cas9, into different cell types both in vitro and in vivo.