Dr. rer. nat. Annalisa Marsico

Annalisa Marsico's scientific journey began at the intersection of physics, biology and AI. Trained as a theoretical physicist at the University of Bari, Italy, she pivoted to bioinformatics with a Master's in Siena and a doctorate at TU Dresden within the Max Planck IMPRS program — an interdisciplinary path that gave her a necessary quantitative rigour applied to biological questions. Postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin cemented her focus on RNA and computational genomics.

In 2014, she started her first independent group at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics while simultaneously holding a Junior Professorship for High-Throughput Genomics at Freie Universität Berlin — a dual role she sustained for four years, building expertise in RNA bioinformatics, machine learning for biological sequences, and teaching. 

Since 2019, she has led the Computational RNA Biology group at Helmholtz Munich's Computational Health Center. Her research sits at the frontier of AI, RNA biology, and graph modeling. Her work advances the integration of experimentally grounded RNA foundation models with network-based approaches to decode RNA–protein regulation and RNA function in health and disease, enabling applications from non-coding mutation interpretation to RNA therapeutic design. She continuously develops sequence-to-function models for molecular interactions in, e.g. viral infections, and pioneered graph convolutional networks for disease gene prioritization across cancer, with current applicaitons to neurological disorders. More recently, she developed AI frameworks leveraging biomedical knowledge graphs for tasks ranging from disease understanding to drug repurposing and non-coding RNA regulation. She envisions the future in combining sequence and network modalities through agentic AI to accelerate therapeutic discovery. In collaboration with industry partners such as Boehringer Ingelheim, Roche, and Ethris, she contributes to RNA biomarker discovery and therapeutic design, with the goal of developing RNA drugs for orphan diseases.