Silvia Vanni achieved a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in Biotechnology in 2008 and a Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Medical Biotechnology cum laude in in 2011, both at the University of Bologna, Italy.She obtained her Philosophy Doctoral (Ph.D.) degree in Functional and Structural Genomic at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) of Trieste, Italy in 2015, under the supervision of Prof. Giuseppe Legname.During the Ph.D. course she focused her main efforts in understanding the molecular events underlying the onset and progression of human prion diseases. She is currently working as a post-doc in Prof. Legname’s lab at SISSA, and her main project is about investigating the gene expression alterations among different tissues in various neurodegenerative diseases with the aim of identifying potential biomarkers for early diagnosis.