Associate Director for Robotics and Director of the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT). From February 2011 to March 2021 she was the Director of the IIT Center for Micro-BioRobotics (CMBR).

Her research activities are in the areas of biologically-inspired robotics and soft robotics. In this context, she is the pioneer of the fields of plant-inspired robots and growing robots. 

She graduated in Biology at the University of Pisa (Italy) in 1995, obtained an International Master Diploma in Eco-Management in 1998 at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA), and in 2011 the Ph.D. in Microsystems Engineering from the University of Rome Tor Vergata. In the years 1999-2009, she was Research Assistant and then Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the SSSA Center for Research in Microengineering (CRIM Lab, now the BioRobotics Institute). In November 2009, she joined IIT at the Center for Micro-BioRobotics (CMBR) as Team Leader, and then from 2011 to 2021 she was the Director CMBR. In 2013, she started research line on Bioinspired Soft Robotics, for which she is the Principal Investigator. From July 2012 to 2017, she also covered the role of Deputy Director for the Supervision and Organization of the IIT Centers Network.

She is member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Tübingen and Stuttgart, Germany), since 2016; and member of the Advisory Committee of the Cluster on Living Adaptive and Energy-autonomous Materials Systems – livMatS (Freiburg, Germany), since 2019. In 2017, from January to July, she was at Imperial College London (UK) as Visiting Faculty of the Aerial Robotics Lab. In 2020, she has obtained the Italian National Scientific Qualification of Full Professor in Bioengineering.