Irene Farabella leads the Armenise-Harvard Integrative Nuclear Architecture Lab at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), within the Center for Human Technologies in Genoa. Her research investigates the structural variability and plasticity of 3D genome organization at the nanoscale, seeking to understand how nuclear architecture shapes gene regulation in physiological and pathological contexts.
Her laboratory integrates imaging techniques, genomics, structural bioinformatics, and theoretical physics to investigate genome organization in single cells at an unprecedented level of detail. The group pioneers chromatin tracing techniques and implements computational tools to visualize and analyse multiple genomic loci within their native nuclear context, supporting multi-omics single-cell investigations. These approaches are complemented by integrative modelling for 3D genome reconstruction to characterize the relationship between genome structure and function, with particular attention to the potential influence of noncoding RNAs on nuclear organization. A central focus is understanding how nuclear components interact across scales during development and differentiation.
Farabella received her MSc in Medical Biotechnology from the University of Milano-Bicocca in 2008. During her studies, she undertook a visiting research period at the Centre for Molecular and Biomolecular Informatics (CMBI) in Nijmegen, supported by an EXTRA PLUS fellowship funded by Fondazione Cariplo, under the supervision of Prof. Gert Vriend and Prof. Marialuisa Lavitrano.
She earned her PhD in Structural Biology in 2013 at the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology (ISMB), UCL and Birkbeck College, London, supported by a Wellcome Trust-funded studentship and supervised by Prof. Maya Topf and Prof. Gabriel Waksman. She pursued her postdoctoral training in Marc Marti-Renom’s laboratory at the Centre Nacional d’Anàlisi Genòmica–Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CNAG-CRG) in Barcelona as a Juan de la Cierva Incorporación Postdoctoral Fellow. During this period, she also worked as a researcher in C.-ting Wu’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School.
In September 2022, she established her independent Armenise-Harvard Integrative Nuclear Architecture Lab at IIT, bringing together her expertise in structural biology, computational modelling, and genome architecture to investigate the functional relationships between the components of the nucleus.