D.E.I.S. - UNIVERSITA' DI BOLOGNA

Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica

• Home
• About me
• Scientific Activity
• Publications
• Teaching
• Links
• Unofficial

Ing. Elisa Ficarra

About me

Elisa Ficarra graduated in Electrical Engineering at the University of Bologna, Italy, March 2001. From 2001 to Dec. 2002 she had a Research Contract at the Computer Science Department (D.E.I.S.) - University of Bologna for the development of applications in Image Processing for biomolecules analysis.

In 2006 she got an International Ph.D. of excellence in Systems and Computer Science at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy. From 2006 to 2008 she was Post-doc researcher at the Politecnico di Torino. Since 2008 she is Assistant Professor at the Politecnico di Torino (DAUIN - EDA Group). Her research activity concerns biomedical and molecular imaging, quantitative immunohistochemistry, algorithms for gene expression analysis, gene classification, clustering and networks, clinical genomics and systems biology.

In 2002 she was Visiting scientist at the Computer Science Dep. of Stanford University (CA, USA) for a project on DNA-protein interaction and docking. From 2004 to 2007 she was consultant for bioinformatics activity and bioimage analysis in the Human Genomics Foundation (HUGEF), Torino. In 2005 she was Visiting scientist at the Integrated System Laboratory of the EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, for a research project on Bioimaging and functional genomics. From 2005 to 2006 she collaborated with the Dep. of Computer Science at the Stanford University and the Integrated Systems Centre at the EPFL on a project on Bioimaging and Gene expression correlation with clinical and immunohistochemical data. From 2005 to 2008 she was the responsible for bioinformatics project planning and scientific coordination of the CIPE project Clinical-molecular correlation in the lung cancer with alteration of the epidermal growth factor. In the Politecnico di Torino she is scientific coordinator of EDA group bioinformatic pojects. In these years she developed automated techniques for DNA and DNA-proteins properties analysis, for the quantification of protein activity in cancer tissues and the correlation of this activity with gene expression and clinical data. Moreover she developed methods for high-throughput heterogeneous gene expression data integration and clustering, and for gene network modelling (see publications for details).

Elisa Ficarra is reviewer of many international journals and conferences (link).

Concerning teaching experiences, she teaches "Clinical image processing", "Algorithms and Advanced Programming", "Computer Programming", and "Multimedia systems" courses for undergraduate students at the Information Science and Technology Institute of Urbino University and at the Politecnico di Torino. She also gives periodic seminars in Europe on her research activity.