Emilia Favuzzi

Emilia Favuzzi is a postdoctoral fellow in Gord Fishell’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute. She grew up in Italy and received a B.S. in Biology and a M.S. in Neurobiology from Sapienza University of Rome. She did her doctoral training in the lab of Beatriz Rico at the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante (Spain) and at the Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at King’s College London. Her graduate research focused on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of inhibitory circuit development and plasticity in the cerebral cortex. In her postdoctoral work, Emilia focused on microglia-inhibitory synapse interactions during development and discovered that specialized microglia differentially engage with specific synapse types. In particular, she found that GABA-receptive microglia selectively sculpt cortical inhibitory – but not excitatory – circuits during development. Over the years, Emilia was awarded numerous prizes such as the Beddington Medal from the British Society for Developmental Biology and the Krieg Cortical Kudos Scholar Award from the Cajal Club. In the future as an independent investigator, she will study how the selective communication between neuronal and glial cell types influences brain wiring.