MD, University of Florence, Italy, 1978
College of Medicine
Her latest research focuses on asthma epigenetics and the mechanisms through which farming environments confer strong protection against asthma in human populations and animal models.
Dr. Vercelli acts as the Co-Director of the Career Development Core, a key educational component designed to foster the research efforts of both junior and senior scientists interested in environmental health, particularly in the context of human complex diseases such as asthma, diabetes and cancer. Her research work is internationally renowned and is at the cutting edge of both immunology and complex disease biology. Her laboratory is generally recognized as one of the leaders in the effort to understand the function of disease-associated genetic variants and gene-environment interactions. Dr. Vercelli is leading the development of multi-disciplinary complex disease research at the University of Arizona by serving as Director of the Arizona Initiative for the Biology of Complex Diseases (ABCD).