My main research areas are animal infection biology, zoonoses and landscape epidemiology.

I am mostly focused on zoonoses and diseases that affect wildlife and livestock, with an emphasis on socially-important, economically-relevant pathogens and on multi-host pathogen scenarios that, through cascading effects, affect animal community composition/structure and ecosystem health.

Being a microbiologist, in the beginning, my natural focus was at the level of the microorganism but my interests and efforts have progressed to contemplate the role of (a)biotic factors and anthropogenic determinants in infectious disease distribution, transmission dynamics and host/population adaptive responses.

Some of the topics covered by my research group include:

- Animal tuberculosis;

- Molecular epidemiology, transmission dynamics and evolutionary genetics of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex bacteria using genome sequencing, comparative genomics and systems biology tools;

- Biology and ecology of gut commensals and microbiota in health and disease, uncovered through metagenomics and culturomics;

- Antimicrobial Resistance Phylodynamics under the One Health Framework

- Diagnosis, Epidemiology and Pathogenesis of bacterial, parasitic and viral infections

- Sentinel surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater

My work is guided by a cross-disciplinary research perspective, integrating microbiological, molecular, genomic and mathematical tools and combining ecological, conservation and socio-economic approaches at different scales.

I am highly committed to support knowledge-based interventions and to inform management decisions and policy.

I strongly believe in action and, over the last years, I have been highly dedicated to applied research and field work to uncover pathogen transmission cascades, also developing biotechnology-based strategies to detect and control pathogens. In parallel, I have been strongly involved in education, capacity building and scientific dissemination.