Ilaria Testa

Ilaria Testa leads a research group that operates at the intersection of physics, chemistry and focusing on the development and application of advanced imaging technologies. Her team is particularly interested in understanding the transient nature of fundamental biological processes, such as synaptic transmission, which involves rapid and timely molecular movements within complex synaptic environments. To study these phenomena, they design and build microscopes capable of capturing dynamic nanoscale images of various proteins in living cells and tissues. By employing techniques like light patterning, sample-adaptive acquisition, and imaging schemes based on photo-switching probes, they have advanced biological imaging from static snapshots to dynamic movies.
Recently, they developed event-triggered microscopy to capture elusive cellular events at high resolution and introduced STARSS, an approach to measure the rotational dynamics of cellular complexes, aiding in the detection of molecular assemblies. These innovations have significantly enhanced the ability to observe and understand complex biological processes in real-time.