Post-Doctoral at IIT@Sapienza–Center for Life Nano Science
PhD in Science of Materials cum laude (2011)

Viola Folli, Ph.D. is a physicist and Chief Scientific Officer at D-Tails Research, where she leads the development of next-generation biosensors, synthetic olfaction systems, and non-invasive cancer diagnostics. She coordinates EUCRASYC, an industrial research program with the Italian Institute of Technology, and ULYSSES, a prestigious EU-funded Pathfinder Open 2025 initiative carried out with leading European universities and cancer centers to develop advanced GPCR-based yeast biosensors for urine-based early cancer detection.

Her interdisciplinary background spans nonlinear optics, microfluidics, neural circuitry, and AI-driven analysis. Before moving into synthetic biology and diagnostics, she built from scratch a C. elegans neurobiology platform integrating calcium imaging, behavioral mapping, and multisensory stimulation technologies.

Viola is the inventor of multiple patents in cancer biosensing and lab-on-chip platforms and has authored numerous peer-reviewed works. Her work focuses on transforming fundamental biophysics and receptor biology into clinically scalable diagnostic technologies that enable earlier, faster, and more accessible cancer risk assessment.

🌐 https://www.linkedin.com/in/viola-folli/

Silvia Schwartz is postdoctoral researcher at Disruptive Technological Advances in Life Science (D-Tails s.r.l. S.B.). She obtained her Master’s degree in Cell Biology from Sapienza University, Rome (2011) and then a PhD in Genetics from Massey University, New Zealand, in 2017. Her Doctoral thesis included in the Dean’s List of Exceptional Theses. After her doctoral studies, Silvia worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon (Portugal). Her primary research interest lies in the field of neurobiology, and during her PhD and postdoc she focused on deciphering the molecular mechanisms underlying neurological phenomena such as learning, memory, and regenerative neurogenesis. Since 2018, she has been working on the Cancer Detection project studying the molecular pathway responsible for olfactory sensing in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Currently, she is focusing on the heterologous expression of C. elegans olfactory receptors in yeast cells. Silvia has extensive expertise in conducting behavioural assays on animal models, and she is skilled in molecular biology procedures, including genome editing via CRISPR/Cas9 methodology in both the nematode and yeast.

🌐 https://linkedin.com/in/silvia-schwartz-425180131

Valeria Lucente is a medical student at La Sapienza University in Rome with a strong background in biology and laboratory techniques. Throughout her studies, Valeria has gained valuable experience working in surgical and internal medicine wards. Since 2020, Valeria has been employed as a laboratory technician in a biology laboratory at the Center for Life Nano and Neurosciences at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Rome. In this role, she has gained extensive experience in genetic crosses on C. elegans and applied this knowledge to investigate the biomolecular basis of the organism's olfactory system. Valeria has also conducted calcium imaging experiments and data analysis to further explore this system. Additionally, Valeria has acquired experience in gene editing techniques for yeast and related molecular biology techniques. She has conducted fluorescence experiments on yeast and developed proficiency in data analysis. .

🌐 https://www.iit.it/people-details/-/people/valeria-lucente

Ilaria holds a Master’s Degree in Biology and Cellular Technologies (cum laude) from Sapienza University of Rome. She joined D-Tails in 2022, where she works on the company’s early cancer detection project, focusing on molecular biology techniques including plasmid cloning, CRISPR and yeast gene editing.

Her work explores chemosensation in C. elegans for cancer sensing, contributing to GPCR identification and screening on patient-derived samples in collaboration with clinical partners. She is currently focused on the deorphanization of GPCRs using representative VOC compounds. Alongside her scientific role, she contributes to creative scientific communication, supporting social media, visual content creation and event activities.

🌐 https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilaria-francesca-cavallo-b43645339