Francesca Marchisella joined the Wyss Center in March 2022 as a Junior Research Scientist in brain connectomics bringing expertise in preclinical neuroscience and imaging. She mainly works with academic partners, performing experiments that involve genetic barcodes to label individual neurons and map their connections to gain a better understanding of how they interact with each other in physiological and pathological states.

Francesca holds a MSc in Medical Biotechnology from University of Milano-Bicocca. She received her PhD in Cell Biology in 2019 from the Abo Akademi University, Turku (Finland), where she studied the role of adult neurogenesis in neuropsychiatric disorders and gained experience with state-of-art technologies such as viral labeling and fiber photometry. 

Prior to joining the Wyss Center, Francesca worked as a postdoctoral researcher at University of Milan, studying the effects of prenatal stress on neuropsychopathology and brain development in offspring.