Dr Federica Mantovani completed her BSc in Biotechnology at the University of Siena and her MSc in Medical Biotechnologies at the University of Padua. She carried out her thesis research during an Erasmus exchange at University Hospital Motol in Prague, working on cytokine levels in autoimmune diseases. She then obtained her PhD with highest honors from the School of Medicine at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, in the Applied Evolutionary Virology laboratory of Pr Gkikas Magiorkinis, specializing in computational analysis of human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) regulation during HIV infection.
In February 2026 she joined the RETROGEN lab at the Institut Necker-Enfants Malades, on the Necker campus in Paris, as a Postdoctoral Fellow, where she studies HERVs and their role in shaping the immune response.
Her research has moved from autoimmunity, beginning with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and then to HERVs. Her doctoral work showed that HIV-1 infection remodels the expression of multiple HERV families in the peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of people living with HIV, and in cell-line and primary macrophage models. She also co-authored a review of the mechanisms controlling HERV expression and their interactions with HIV.