Dr Zinzalla studied chemistry at the University of Milan (Italy), where she also carried out her PhD studies with Prof. Stefano Maiorana and Dr Clara Baldoli, focusing on developing chemical probes to use as biosensors.
After her PhD in 2004 she was awarded a Marie Curie EIF Individual Research Fellowship and came to Cambridge as postdoctoral research assistant at the Department of Chemistry with Prof. Steven Ley, where she explored the role of chemical molecular diversity in drug discovery.
In 2006 she joined the School of Pharmacy, University College London (UK) as a senior research fellow funded by Cancer Research UK (CR UK), within the CR UK Drug Discovery unit headed by Prof. David E. Thurston. She led research aimed at discovering protein-protein interaction inhibitors of transcriptional factors.
In 2012 she joined the Karolinska Institutet where she started her own research group as principal investigator (PI) and an assistant professor in chemical biology at the Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology (MTC) Department. In summer 2024 she joined the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences, Uppsala Biomedical Center, Uppsala University.
Her research focuses on determining how transcriptional regulators orchestrate gene expression programs and determine cell fate in normal and malignant cells. In particular, she and her team have been working on two key molecular machineries, the transcription factor MYC and SWI/SNF (BAF) chromatin remodelling complexes; and how their interplay could be exploited to develop new therapeutic approaches in cancer and for regenerative medicine.
At the University of Cambridge Dr Zinzalla is a long-term visiting researcher/principal investigator at the Department of Pharmacology, where she also lectures for the third-year course, Part II Pharmacology course.
