Lucia Maccioni was born in 1996 in San Severino Marche (MC), Italy.

She received her Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering in October 2018 from the Marche Polytechnic University and her Master’s degree in Bioengineering in December 2020 from University of Padua.

Since October 2021, she has been a PhD student in Information Engineering at the University of Padova, under the supervision of Dr Mattia Veronese.

Her main research interests concern the development and validation of non-invasive methodologies for the quantification of TSPO PET imaging and the derivation of imaging biomarkers of neuroinflammation.

During her doctoral studies, Lucia spent 6 months at the Pain and Neuroinflammation Imaging Lab of Prof Marco Laggia at Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, working on the investigation of inflammatory processes in chronic pain patients. 

As winner of the PiW-Ciz scholarship, Lucia had the opportunity to visit the Queen’s Medical Research Institute (QMRI), University of Edinburgh, and work alongside the Edinburgh Imaging team of Dr Adriana Tavares to the analysis of dynamic whole-body TSPO PET scans on mice.