Maria Rescigno

Full Professor

Maria Rescigno is the scientific director of the Center for Molecular Medicine (CeMM) in Vienna and full professor at Humanitas University, Milan. She graduated in Biology. From 1991 to 1994 she worked at the University of Cambridge, UK, From 2001 to 2017 she has been the director of the Dendritic cell biology and immunotherapy Unit at the Department of Experimental Oncology at the European Institute of oncology. She was the first to show that dendritic cells actively participate to bacterial uptake in the gut, the existence of a gut vascular barrier that resembles the blood brain barrier and the discovery of a new vascular barrier in the choroid plexus. Her major field of interest is mucosal immunology, the microbiota and the development of new cancer immunotherapy strategies. She authored more than 200 publications in high impact journals including Science, Nature Immunol, Immunity, J. Exp. Med., Science TM. She was elected EMBO young investigator in 2007 and in 2011 EMBO member. In 2008-2013 she was visiting professor at the University of Oslo. She has been the recipient of three ERC grants (starting, proof-of-concept and consolidator). From 2019 she is member of the EMBO council. She seats in the technical and scientific board of several charities, funding agencies and in different companies. She has received several awards including the Avon prize as 'symbolic woman of the city of Milan' (2011), a mention of honor of the Belgian embassy (2022), the Rome prize for business, economics and social affairs (2022), the De Sanctis prize for social health (2023) and The Pezcoller-Marina Larcher Fogazzaro-EACR Women in Cancer Research Award (2024).
In 2016 Maria Rescigno has founded Postbiotica s.r.l. a spin-off of the University of Milan that exploits microbiota-derived metabolites as new pharmaceutical agents. In 2017 Postbiotica has won two competitions: Bioupper (Italy) and MyStart BCN (Spain).