Dr. Daphne Selvaggia Cabianca

Daphne Cabianca studied Biological Sciences at the University of Pavia, Italy. During her doctoral studies in the group of Davide Gabellini at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan, she investigated the molecular mechanism at the basis of FSHD muscular dystrophy. Her work (Cell, 2012) increased our understanding of how repetitive DNA and long non-coding RNAs regulate chromatin modifications and transcription, with implications for human disease.

For her postdoctoral training, Daphne moved to Basel (Switzerland) and joined the group of Susan Gasser at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI). There, she learned to use C. elegans as a model to study 3D genome organization and epigenetic processes in a whole organism. In her main postdoctoral study (Nature, 2019), she characterized a novel mechanism by which the active chromatin compartment regulates the spatial localization and repression of the silenced compartment of the genome.

In 2020, Daphne started her own group at the Institute of Functional Epigenetics at Helmholtz Munich, and in 2025 she was awarded tenure.

Research in her group focuses on understanding how environmental stimuli—particularly dietary and metabolic cues—shape chromatin organization and function across multiple scales, from chromatin modifications to higher-order genome architecture. Using dietary and genetic manipulations combined with live confocal microscopy, her group recently discovered the first large-scale 3D genome reconfiguration induced by fasting (Nature Cell Biology, 2024).

Her mission is to uncover the mechanisms by which environmental signals drive cellular dysfunction and disease through epigenetic processes, providing fundamental insights to guide the development of novel preventive and therapeutic strategies for environment-related diseases, including metabolic disorders.