Velia Siciliano is a Tenured Principal Investigator at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), where she has led the Laboratory of Synthetic and Systems Biology for Biomedicine since 2017. Since 2022, she has also served as a member of IIT’s Scientific Board and Associate Director for IIT’s network of centres.
She obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Biotechnology from the University of Naples Federico II and completed her PhD in 2012 at the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM), Naples. She subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Synthetic Biology Center and Department of Biological Engineering. In 2015, she established her independent research programme at Imperial College London as an Imperial Research Fellow.
She brings distinctive expertise in engineering biology to Italy, leading one of the few groups in the country dedicated to programming mammalian cell behaviour through synthetic biology for biomedical applications. Her research combines synthetic biology, systems biology, computational modelling and immunoengineering to develop synthetic gene circuits, RNA regulatory systems and molecular sensor-actuator devices. Her laboratory focuses on improving cancer immunotherapies and addressing T-cell exhaustion. Her work has also contributed to understanding and mitigating intracellular resource competition, improving the robustness and predictability of mammalian cell engineering.
She has secured an ERC Starting Grant, two ERC Proof of Concept grants, BURnOUT and CLAUDIA, and an ERC Consolidator Grant, TeaM, scheduled to begin in 2027. Her research is also supported by the Italian Science Fund through T-SENTO and by European collaborative programmes.
Her distinctions include MIT Technology Review Italy’s Innovators Under 35 award, the Galileo Galilei Award and Inspiring Fifty. She also serves on the WHO Global Health Foresight Committee, the advisory board of the European Synthetic Biology Society and international journal editorial boards.
5 Most recent representative publications:
Bonfà G. et al. A modular synthetic promoter toolkit for programmable gene control in activated and chronically stimulated T cells. Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-77730-7
De Martino I., Russo L., Marchetti M., Siciliano V. Engineering a PD-L1-sensing synthetic receptor for programmable macrophage response. Journal of Biological Engineering (2026). DOI: 10.1186/s13036-026-00708-y
Pisani M. et al. Computational identification of small molecules for increased gene expression by synthetic circuits in mammalian cells. Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-62529-9
Frei T. et al. Characterization and mitigation of gene expression burden in mammalian cells. Nature Communications(2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18392-x
Siciliano V. et al. Engineering modular intracellular protein sensor-actuator devices. Nature Communications (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03984-5