luca fusar bassini

i study the diversity of cells in the mammalian brain, in cell culture + developing and adult mice, using computational tools to make sense of the molecular datasets that modern biology produces. i work in the la manno lab at epfl, where we build methods and atlases to map gene expression and metabolism across space and time.

i grew up in crema, italy, and studied biology at the scuola normale superiore. before the phd i did my thesis in the yu lab at boston children's hospital, studying splicing and antisense oligonucleotides for rare diseases. in a previous life i represented italy at the international biology olympiad (2017).

my research includes single-cell/spatial omics, live imaging, machine learning, knowledge graphs, and more. more broadly, i care about understanding neurodevelopmental disorders through dynamic modeling and the convergence of biology and ai, with the dream to build technologies that measure biology at an unprecedented scale.

my phd is funded by a beautiful scholarship called boehringer ingelheim fonds phd fellowship, and my master's was financed thanks to an ermenegildo zegna founder's scholarship; back then, i was named among nova's top-10 under-25 in healthcare.

outside the lab i like to build things. i am now petting ricet, a research automation agent built on claude, and paperboat, an ai-powered scientific newsletter. i write about ai and biotech for wired italia. i am a venture scout for ewor. i founded and organized the single-cell and spatial metabolomics online day — a virtual event that brought together 900+ participants from 60+ countries across two editions. i founded tedxpisa and sometimes i do art with legos, also within public events such as building piazza dei cavalieri out of 50,000 lego bricks.

i help organize lauzhack, mentor students through lead the future, and volunteered at corp india, a shelter for street children in mumbai. i love podcasting though this is currently on hold — quel vaso di pandora interviewed italian talents, the biotech futurist featured outstanding scientists, and risveglio a mumbai was recorded during my time in mumbai.