Mapping chromatin compartments remodeling in cancer by their biochemical properties

Speaker: dr Francesco Ferrari, IFOM - the AIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology, Institute of Molecular Genetics, National Research Council of Italy - IGM-CNR, Italy

Talk:  Mapping chromatin compartments remodeling in cancer by their biochemical properties

Time: 02.10.2026, 09:00

Venue: Intercollegiate Faculty of Biotechnology, Abrahama 58, hall 042B

Francesco Ferrari is Group Leader of the Computational Genomics Laboratory at IFOM – the AIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology in Milan – and Research Director at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Italian National Research Council (IGM-CNR) in Pavia. His research focuses on understanding how three-dimensional chromatin organization and epigenetic mechanisms regulate gene expression, cell identity and cellular plasticity, and how these processes become altered during cancer development and progression.

He obtained his PhD in Biotechnology and Molecular Medicine from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 2008. After postdoctoral research at the University of Padova, he spent nearly five years in Peter J. Park’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School, where he developed computational approaches for the analysis of next-generation sequencing data and investigated chromatin and transcriptional dynamics in different biological models. In 2015, he established the Computational Genomics Laboratory at IFOM. His laboratory integrates experimental epigenomics, computational biology, statistical modelling and functional genomics to investigate chromatin compartmentalization, heterochromatin dynamics and enhancer–gene regulatory interactions. The group has developed innovative approaches, including SAMMY-seq and 4f-SAMMY-seq, which enable the analysis of chromatin compartments and heterochromatin organization in limited biological material and clinically relevant samples.

Francesco Ferrari has published in leading international journals, including Nature Methods, Nature Materials, Nature Communications, Nucleic Acids Research, Cancer Research, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Journal of Experimental Medicine, eLife, Bioinformatics and Cancer Immunology Research. His work includes methodological advances in chromatin architecture analysis as well as studies on cancer epigenetics, genome regulation and tumour–microenvironment interactions.