What attracted you to biology?

As a child I read about Louis Pasteur, creator of the first vaccine for rabies, and Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin. Their research contributed to a better world and I decided I wanted to be a physician-scientist to do the same.

Why did you focus on traumatic brain injury?

While at the University of Messina Medical School in Italy, I began to focus my PhD training on neural intensive care. I found it fascinating that you need to know how so many organs are related to treat these patients, the brain being the most complex. I did my thesis on how best to use biomarkers — molecules that can serve as indicators of disease progression — as targets for therapy. Yet none existed for traumatic brain injury, so I decided to focus on developing these biomarkers. People with traumatic brain injuries are often young people hurt in dramatic situations. Their recovery depends on accurate, early treatment that takes into account the person's genetics.

How is your award-winning work innovative?

We aim to use biomarkers to assess the magnitude of the brain injury as well as to help determine the most effective treatment. People can seem to have a mild-to-moderate brain injury, yet it is impossible to accurately measure the damage. We hope our work will one day change medical practice to prevent secondary complications and improve the survival of the 1.4 million people in the United States alone who experience a traumatic brain injury each year.

You're only 31 — were you surprised to get the award?

Yes, I was. I left Italy only two years ago, and these types of award are rarely given to someone so young. But I would not have got it without the strong team effort needed to do this type of research. My mentors helped me develop a unique set of skills — merging my clinical focus on the brain with a knowledge of biomarkers and genetics — and this award just makes me want to work harder to use those skills to find treatments.

What are your long-term goals?

Now that we've found diagnostic biomarkers, we are working on their clinical validation — confirming the different biomarkers in people with traumatic brain injury compared with controls, assessing their diagnostic accuracy, and demonstrating that they provide information that aids medical decision-making. Once we have clinical validation, our goal is to secure US Food and Drug Administration approval by 2012. The agency has not approved a new treatment for traumatic brain injury in the past 30 years.

What opportunities come with this award?

The award is given by Bridges to Italy, which supports women scientists and fosters collaborations between Italy and the United States. As biomedicine in Italy continues to move towards conducting science with more clinical utility, I hope to advocate for more investment in young investigators.

What inspires you?

Two quotes illustrate my belief that practical people are important, but so are dreamers. My mentor, Ronald Hayes, said: “We seek the truth as scientists, we heal the sick as clinicians, and we teach others to do the same as mentors.” And Marie Curie said: “A scientist is not only a technician; he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.”