Simona Polo

Simona Polo received her Degree in Biology at the University of Milan (Italy) in 1991, with a thesis in genetic. She did postdoctoral work at DIBIT, HSR, where she studied chemokine-mediated inhibition of HIV entry into cells. In 1999 she joined the group of Pier Paolo Di Fiore at the IEO, first as senior fellow and then as a staff scientist, acquiring a strong expertise in the field of endocytosis.

At that time she started to work on the role of ubiquitin in signaling and internalization of the EGFR. Since 2005 she is Group leader at the IFOM-IEO campus and Researcher at the Department of Medicine, Surgery and Dentistry of the University of Milan. Polo’s group gave an important contribution to the comprehension of the molecular mechanisms underlying the post-translational modification of proteins by ubiquitin. In 2009 she received the prestigious EMBO Young Investigator award.

Simona Polo’s recent efforts are dedicated to “decode” the Ub-based signaling networks using a combination of functional genomic approaches.