Person

Mazzarotto Francesco

Positions:

Ricercatori a tempo determinato

Academic Department:

Department of Molecular and Translational Medicine

Course Catalogue:

https://unibs.coursecatalogue.cineca.it/docente-ma...

GSD

Gruppo 06/MEDS-01 - GENETICA MEDICA

Academic field (2024 version)

Settore MEDS-01/A - Genetica medica

Scientific profile

Francesco is a bioinformatician with a mixed background between biology and bioinformatics, working in psychiatric and cardiovascular genetics, with a particular focus on schizophrenia and cardiomyopathies. More specifically, his current research activities are primarily focused on understanding the role of rare genetic variation in determining individual susceptibility to disease and on integrating such variants into polygenic risk scores, as well as on the application of pangenomic approaches to improve variant detection. Francesco is Assistant Professor in Medical Genetics within the Department of Molecular and Translational Medicine of the University of Brescia, Honorary Research Fellow in the Cardiovascular Genomics and Precision Medicine group at Imperial College London (where he obtained his PhD in 2016) and Visiting Researcher at the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Cambridge. Further details are available in the dedicated Curriculum Vitae sections.

Curriculum Vitae

Dr Mazzarotto was born in 1987 in the Northeast of Italy, and lived in his hometown in the Dolomites until his university enrollment. He spent his 4th high school year in Otorohanga College, New Zealand.

He graduated at the University of Bologna, Italy in Biology (BSc in 2010, with honours) and subsequently in Bioinformatics (MSc in 2012, with honours), after having developed his MSc thesis project at the University of Tampere, Finland.

In 2012 he was awarded a EU-funded Marie Curie fellowship for a PhD program at Imperial College London, UK, to perform cardiovascular genetics research within a European network of excellence (CardioNeT). He obtained his PhD in 2016, and moved to the University of Florence, Italy, for his post-doc, continuing his research in the field of cardiovascular genetics. In 2016 he also obtained a honorary appointment as a research associate by Imperial College London, which enabled him to keep being also a member of the Cardiovascular Genomics and Precision Medicine group at Imperial.

In 2021, he obtained a position as a lecturer in medical genetics at the University of Brescia, Italy, where he keeps working in the cardiovascular genetics field and expanded into psychiatry genetics. Just before this, he was nominated Knight of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy, for his scientific achievements as a young researcher.

Today, he is Assistant Professor in Medical Genetics at the University of Brescia (Italy), Honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London (UK) and Visiting Researcher at the University of Cambridge (UK). In 2026, he was awarded a 1 million Euro grant from Fondazione Regionale per la Ricerca Biomedica for a 3-year research project aimed at advancing our understanding of the genetic background of schizophrenia by means of pangenomic approaches.

NOTES:
1. The full CV in English is available here: https://www.unibs.it/it/ugov/person/205564
2. Imperial College London personal web page: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/f.mazzarotto
3. Cardiovascular Genetics and Genomics group, Imperial College London: https://cvgenetics.org/people/
4. LinkedIn / ResearchGate: Francesco Mazzarotto; X: franz_mazz; BlueSky: f-mazz.bsky.social