I’m Maria Grazia (aka Grace) and I’m a researcher at the Biological Psychiatry Lab of the Saint John of God Clinical Research Centre of Brescia (Italy). I started my career in the Stress, Psychiatry and Immunology Lab (SPILab) of King’s College London, first as an Erasmus student and then as a Research Assistant, and I’m still collaborating with my former colleagues from the SPILab.

My interests and skills lie in the biological aspects of psychiatric disorders, and my work includes trying to address alterations in gene expression, neurogenesis and inflammatory response potentially related to the etiopathogenesis of disorders such as depression and psychosis, and how these alterations might be recovered with pharmacological treatment.

I aim at doing this by using a wide array of different assays and approaches, as well as different models, including human hippocampal neuronal stem cell cultures, animal models and biological clinical samples.

Perinatal psychiatry, being my most recent topic of focus, was the inspiration behind my first blog “The secret bond between mother and child: The power of breast milk nutrients”, based on a systematic review I recently wrote and published in Brain, Behavior and Immunology, the scientific journal.

Future blogs are surely going to cover the topic of mental health in the perinatal period, but won’t be limited to that!