Paola Bonfanti is Professor of Epithelial Cell Biology & Regenerative Medicine at the UCL Institute of Immunity and Transplantation. She is also Senior Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute. 

Paola graduated in Medicine and Surgery with honours from the University of Milan in 2001 and subsequently moved to the Sanford Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California where she worked on neural differentiation of human embryonic stem cells. In 2008 she completed her PhD at the EPFL in Lausanne under the supervision of Prof. Yann Barrandon. Her work demonstrated that thymic epithelial cells have the ability to reconstitute the thymus microenvironment but also all differentiated progeny of skin stem cells (Nature, 2010). This work led to the identification of a multipotent epithelial stem cell in the embryonic, neonatal and also adult thymus. 

In 2010, thanks to an EMBO Long Term Fellowship she moved to the Diabetes Research Centre (DRC) in Brussels to work on pancreas regeneration with a project focusing on the identification of lineage relationship of pancreatic stem/progenitor cells. In 2011 Paola was awarded the Young Investigator Award in Innovative Therapy for Type 1 Diabetes from the European Foundation for the Study of Diabetes and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation supported by an unrestricted grant from Roche (EFSD/JDRF/Roche). During her period in Brussels Paola’s research work contributed to several publications focusing on potency of expandable pancreatic progenitors and plasticity of adult acinar cells (EMBOJ, 2013; StemCells&Dev, 2015).

Paola was awarded a UCL Rosetrees Excellence Fellowship in 2013 to pursue her interest in epithelial stem cell biology and regenerative medicine. In 2015 she obtained a Starting grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for her project on thymus biology and in 2016 she was selected as Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute.