Simona is Associate Professor of Human Genomics at the University of Rome Sapienza, where she currently directs her research laboratory the Giunta Lab, to study the role of genomic instability in degenerative diseases like cancer and aging. She teaches Genome Evolution and Cell Cycle for the M.Sc. in Genetics & Molecular Biology. After graduating with a first class B.Sc. (Hons) Cancer Biology from Brunel in London (UK), she earned a Ph.D. in Cancer Research at the University of Cambridge in the lab of Prof. Steve Jackson studying DNA damage repair in mitosis. She worked as a researcher at the nuclear reactor of the EMBL/ILL (France), and as a UICC Fellow to lead a new cancer and nutrition study at CSIRO (Australia). She was then a Research Scientist at the Rockefeller University in New York (USA) for almost 10 years, funded by a Women & Science Fellowship, the American Italian Cancer Foundation Fellowship, and grants to the lab from Tri-Institutional Stem Cell Initiative with Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital and the NIH. After almost two decades abroad, she was awarded the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Reintegration Fellowship, the Rita Levi Montalcini "Bringing back the brains" Award from the Italian Ministry of Education, SEAL of Excellence funding from Sapienza and the Start-Up Grant from AIRC, all of which allowed her return to her hometown, Rome, and to start of her research program in Italy. In 2022, Simona received the prestigous ERC Starting Grant to find her work on centromere repetitive DNA instability. Simona Giunta also founding President of a non-profit NGO for science outreach, Know Science Inc. (USA), co-founding President & Chair of the genome Integrity Italian Network (GiiN), scientific advisor for the United Nations, the SDGs and STEM organizations, and is a passionate advocate for science communication and gender equality in STEM.