Speaker bio page for Francesca Gazzaniga

Bio

Francesca grew up in Vermont and got her bachelor’s degree in Biology from Dartmouth College in 2007. She went to University California, San Francisco for her Ph.D. where she studied the effects of stress on telomeres and telomerase in aging in the lab of Nobel laureate, Elizabeth Blackburn.  She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dennis Kasper at Harvard Medical School where she studies how gut bacteria affect the immune system. She also works at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard where she developed a microfluidic mouse gut on a chip to model intestinal infections. In 2018, she was selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a DARPA Riser, an especially promising early career scientist, and presented at DARPA’s 60^th anniversary conference. In her free time, she loves hiking, camping, and cross country skiing with her husband and 3-year-old son.