- PhD Student, University of L’Aquila, Italy
- WP2: ER stress, intracellular signalling cascades and biomechanical consequences
- Secondment to MCRI, Summer 2017
- Secondment to HKU, Summer 2019
Argia is a PhD student in the Skeletal Disease Laboratory headed by Professor Nadia Rucci at the University of L’Aquila, Italy. She has expertise on mouse and human osteoclast and osteoblast cultures and their phenotyping. Her skills also cover molecular biology techniques, in vivo and ex vivo studies and the evaluation of mouse bone phenotype by µCT and histomorphometry. She is currently involved in a project aimed at investigating the role of Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) in bone metastasis.
Within the RUBICON exchange programme, in 2017 she visited Prof. Shireen Lamande’s laboratory at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute (MCRI) in Melbourne, Australia, for 3 months. In this period, she learned how to investigate the mechanism underlying ER stress and autophagy, in order to better understand their roles in the pathogenesis of osteopetrosis.
In summer 2019, Argia visited the laboratory of Professor Danny Chan at the LKS Faculty of Medicine, School of Biomedical Science (HKUMed), in Hong Kong. She was trained in the main assays used to study intervertebral disc degeneration in genetic skeletal diseases and learned the phenotypic analysis of IVD in mouse models.
