Melissa Basso

I am a PhD student at the University of Surrey, in the UK. Originally from Italy, I obtained a BSc in Psychobiology and an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Padua. During my academic training, I interned at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, where I contributed to clinical and research work focused on the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases. Through this experience, and after interning at Kathrin’s C. Kadosh’s lab at the University of Surrey, I became aware of the impact of anxiety on quality of life and disease risk, and its complex relationship with lifestyle and the gut microbiome. Thus, my current work aims to map the diet-microbiome-host interactions that shape anxiety symptoms by combining dietary and psychological assessments, metagenomic sequencing, and machine learning based approaches.

At the Gibbons lab, I plan to extend this further by adopting a personalized approach through the implementation of genome-scale metabolic modelling. Ultimately, my goal is to contribute to bridging the gap between psychology and biology through what I refer to as a psychobiology systems approach.