Dr. Veronica Veschi is an Associate Professor of General Pathology (MEDS-02A) at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. After graduating cum laude in Medicine at the University La Sapienza (2006), she specialized in Oncology (2011) at the same institution and completed a PhD in Molecular Medicine (2014), part of which she carried out at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD, USA (2013-2016), where she worked for 4 years as a pre- and post-doctoral fellow with leading international scientists. She later returned to Italy (2017) as an AIRC fellow and became a university researcher at the University of Palermo and, in 2023, an Associate Professor at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”.

Dr. Veschi's research has been focused on the molecular and epigenetic mechanisms regulating tumorigenesis, programmed cell death, and cancer stem cells, particularly in neuroblastoma and colorectal cancer. She became an expert in epigenetics and performed a large-scale screening of chromatin regulators in neuroblastoma. She also developed advanced in vitro and in vivo models to study cancer stem cells from colorectal and other adult tumors.

Her main scientific achievement was the discovery of a novel epigenetic mechanism of p53 functional inactivation mediated by the enzyme SETD8. She demonstrated that SETD8 inhibition restores p53 tumor-suppressor activity, providing a translational basis for innovative therapies targeting cancer stem cells in tumors with wild-type but inactive p53 (Veschi et al., Cancer Cell 2017; Veschi et al Molecular Cancer 2025, Veschi V. last author Journal of Experimental & Clinical Cancer Research 2026).

Her current and future research aims to: • identify key epigenetic regulators in neuroblastoma and colorectal cancer • investigate p53 regulation in cancer stem cells and tumor-associated macrophages •develop innovative therapeutic strategies targeting cancer stem cells, in inflammation-associated colorectal cancer