Ilaria Piazza

Ilaria Piazza received her doctorate from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany where she first learnt about proteomics in the laboratory of Martin Beck. This brought her to study protein structures with a -omics perspective in the Picotti laboratory at ETH Zurich where she focused on the application of chemoproteomics methods in complex biological systems. There Ilaria developed a method that combines limited proteolysis and mass spectrometry to characterise interactions between proteins and metabolites (LiP-SMap, more generally known as LiP-MS). Later Ilaria further optimised LiP-MS to discover protein drug targets on a global scale in collaboration with the proteomics company Biognosys. In September 2020 Ilaria started her ERC funded research group in Berlin at the Berlin institute of medical systems biology (BIMSB), which is part of the Max Delbrück Centre for molecular medicine in the Helmholtz association.