Federica PALMA holds a PhD in microbial genomics applied to Food Safety from the Department of Agriculture and Food Science of the University of Bologna, Italy. During her Master’s degree in Food Science and Technology (2011-2014) and doctoral studies (2014-2018), she specialised in phenotypic testing and molecular typing of bacterial foodborne pathogens as well as in microbial genomics and bioinformatics.
During her PhD, she carried out international research projects within the objectives of the European project COMPARE and in collaboration with the research team of the EFSA co-funded project INNUENDO, focusing on genomics-based surveillance of foodborne pathogens persisting along the food chain (e.g. Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella enterica).
During her postdoctoral fellowships (2018-2020), she worked in the Salmonella and Listeria Unit of the French agency for food safety, ANSES (Maisons-Alfort), applying advanced microbial genomic methods to (i) assess the persistence, cold adaption and resistance to antimicrobials of L. monocytogenes, (ii) design genome databases for source attribution of monophasic S. Typhimurium, (iii) implement logistic regression models for source attribution based on accessory genes, and (iv) rapidly detect outbreak-related foodborne pathogens, within the context of the projects COMPARE and One Health European Joint Programme ListAdapt. In 2020, she started working as a scientific project manager at the Biological Resources Center of Institut Pasteur (CRBIP, Paris) in order to coordinate the strategic developments of the genomic taxonomy system “BIGSdb-Pasteur” for public health microbiology and integrated pathogens surveillance.
