Alice Bertocchi
Alice grew up in Bergamo, Italy and graduated from King’s College London in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Science. During her bachelor’s degree, she conducted research in the lab of Dr. Shiv Pillai at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her research in Dr. Pillai’s lab focused on understanding defects in B cell development and activation in patients with Common Variable Immunodeficiency or IgG4-related disease. Following this exciting research experience in Boston, she completed her undergraduate thesis project in Dr. David Fear’s lab at the MRC & Asthma UK Centre, London, United Kingdom. There, she optimized an ex vivo culture assay to dissect the mechanisms regulating class-switch recombination to immunoglobulin IgE in patients with asthmatic disease. Now, as a PhD candidate co-mentored by Dr. Stephanie Dougan and Dr. Judith Agudo, she is currently studying lymph node colonization in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, with a focus on the metastatic role of B cells.