Katerina Politi, Biology

In the States, but with many "Nuovine": «One of the most beautiful characteristics of NY is being able to share these splendid experiences with numerous guests, including some former students of the Collegio Nuovo: 'Shakespeare in the Park' with Maria Paola Ferretti, the visit of the city with my namesake Lucia Politi..." (Nuovità, n. 11).

Having graduated from the European School of Varese, Katerina, of Italian-American origin, turns 18 when she enters Collegio Nuovo, in the year in which the agreement with the University of Heidelberg is signed. An agreement that marks the increasingly international path of the institution created by the Founder Sandra Bruni Mattei, who, in creating the Collegio Nuovo, also visited many US campuses.
Among her classmates, Katerina, enrolled in Biology, will find another Italian-American Medicine student, Marina Vivarelli, in the College, with whom she will remain in contact in the future, despite their different geographical destinies. Close above all with a couple of biologist conscripts, Michela Bertero from Genoa and Giulia Campanini from Voghera, she nevertheless decides, in the third year of her studies, to spend a year in Chapel Hill in North Carolina, thanks to an exchange between scientific faculties of universities in Europe and USA.
A year full of academic challenges, for her, who finds herself navigating between graduate and undergraduate courses on that liberal island of Chapel Hill in a traditionally conservative Carolina. A year of comparisons and sharing in the name of "diversity", also participating in the Unitas program.
Katerina immediately won a US Government scholarship for an internship at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda: in Washington, where she then moved, she shared a house with several students and in the laboratory she was exposed to an international environment, especially Spanish ones, South Americans and… Italians.

Another move, three years before 2000: this time to New York, partly financed by a US Government scholarship, for a PhD in Genetics and Developmental Biology at Columbia University following her degree at the University of Pavia. Three years later Katerina feels like a true "New Yorker": she actively participates in the political life of the city to encourage Hillary Clinton's candidacy for senator (who will launch the Women in Public Service Project a dozen years later, to which the Collegio has also participated since 2013). She competes... in charity races in Central Park to raise funds for scientific research (also in the company of the already mentioned Bertero who is visiting her!), she frequents the Nuovina Francesca Nespoli, a political scientist engaged in a Master's degree at Columbia (they will receive the diploma on the same day, as together they will welcome, in 1999, a delegation from Pavia invited by the Italian Academy of Columbia, led by the Rector of the University of Pavia Roberto Schmid, with the presence also of the Rector Paola Bernardi). Enthusiasm and difficulty characterize this period, with a positive outcome in an open and innovative context where, she says, "the only limit is your imagination" (Nuovitàn. 11).
After her PhD she obtained a position as Research Fellow at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York: her exciting laboratory life focused on research in the oncology field where she worked with Nobel Prize Harold Varmus. She becomes Senior Research Scientist the year in which the College celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, in whose celebrations Katerina participates in person and, before that, collaborating on the publication  New College goes international curated by the Rector and Saskia Avalle, who will be her guest in New York in the year of inauguration of the Nuovo agreement with Columbia's Barnard. Meanwhile Katerina is preparing for a double change, after her marriage to an American...

... While waiting for her son, the call comes as Assistant Professor at the Yale Department of Pathology, in particular at the Yale Cancer Center: Katerina moves with the whole family and begins her new adventure, also facing very hard times.
As Principal Investigator (and Associate Professor) today he directs a laboratory where he recreates the close-knit spirit of collegiate life, which he does not forget in even long-distance relationships, for example with his "running buddy" in Central Park, now IDIBAPS Director of strategy in Barcelona, ​​or the other Italian-American Nuovina, now a Nephrologist at the Bambin Gesù Hospital… in the Vatican! And the results of his team in terms of publications, including open access, as recommended by the virologist Ilaria Capua, are not lacking! Meanwhile, in the College, thanks also to the new President Anna Malacrida, a biologist, contacts are being created with Yale University itself, through the hospitality of Prof. Serap Aksoj in the College.
Thanks to Katerina's availability and interest, since 2016 some students have had the opportunity to carry out medical and research internships not only at the laboratory she directs, but also in other research centers at Yale University.

Have the courage to take risks and never give up!