I am an Italian entomologist and biogeographer interested in unravelling the historical and present-day factors responsible for species distributions.

I obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences and a Master’s degree in Biology, both from the University of Florence. My research journey began early in my academic career, working as an independent researcher on behavioral ecology and then shifting to invasion biology, studying species such as squirrels, parrots, and planarians. This work involved reporting new occurrences, assessing impacts, and gaining insights into the ecological consequences of invasive species introduction. My interests later expanded into genetics, particularly butterfly phylogeography, during an Erasmus placement at the Butterfly Diversity and Evolution Lab (BDEL) at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF) in Barcelona. For my Master’s thesis, and as a Research Assistant at BDEL working on a National Geographic-funded project, I studied the migration of the Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui), focusing on citizen science and the management of collections. Meanwhile, I continued my work on ant and butterfly diversity and barcoding which led me to work as a Research Assistant at the ZEN Lab (University of Florence). By obtaining the “la Caixa” Doctoral Fellowship I had been able to start my PhD at the BDEL. During my PhD I gathered and generated massive genetic datasets both on ants and butterflies and used them to explore the processes which generated them, describe species new to science and report invasive species. Currently, I am continuing my research at BDEL.

I am an advocate for open access and open-source research, and I’m a contributor to Wikipedia and PhyloPic and curator of the citizen science platform iNaturalist.