Irene Costantini

Researcher

Irene Costantini completed her master’s degree in Medical and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at the University of Florence in 2011. Her thesis work was performed at the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, under the mentorship of Prof. Mihai Netea. She obtained her International Doctorate in Atomic and Molecular Photonics at the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS), University of Florence, in 2016 under the mentorship of Prof. Francesco S. Pavone. During her graduate research, she developed a versatile clearing method based on 2,2′-Thiodiethanol (TDE) to perform multimodal imaging of both murine and human brains. The paper entitles “A versatile clearing agent for multi-modal brain imaging” has become a milestone in the field gaining more than 120 citations in 5 years. She continued her work as a post-doc at LENS Biophysics Lab and in 2018 she became a researcher at the National Institute of Optics, National Research Council, Italy. In 2020 she obtained a research fellow position at the Biology Department of the University of Florence, Italy. Irene Costantini’s research activity is focused on the three-dimensional reconstruction of intact neuronal networks, with cellular resolution, of human and animal organs using advanced microscopy techniques such as two-photon fluorescence microscopy and light-sheet microscopy. To this aim, she is developing new tissue transformation methods (clearing and labeling techniques) to obtain transparent samples that are macromolecule-permeable and compatible with fluorescence immunostaining. IC published 19 scientific articles in peer-reviewed newspapers and presented her work at numerous international conferences. Although her main background is in biotechnology, she has acquired in these years’ knowledge of microscopy, optics, and in general of biophysics.