After completing my undergraduate studies at the Department of Genetics and Microbiology of the University of Pavia in Italy, and gaining some research experience in the laboratory of Dr Robert Wells at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, I obtained my PhD at the Rockefeller University in New York, working in the laboratory of Dr Titia de Lange. I continued my studies in the telomere filed in the laboratory of Prof David Shore at the Deprtment of Molecular Biology at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. I then established my laboratory at the Genome Damage and Stability Centre at the University of Sussex upon being awarded a Senior Non-Clinical Fellowship by the Medical Research Council.