From Rome to Boston to chase a dream: an interview with Maria Laura Blefari

Maria Laura Blefari was only eight years old when she first said 'when I grow up I want to be an engineer, but not the one who builds houses. I want to conquer diseases'. A few years later, Maria Laura was admitted to the Biomedical Engineering course at the Biomedical Campus.

Having left her beloved Calabria when she was only 18, Maria Laura decided to make her degree course a mission. After graduating in 2007, she moved to Pisa for a PhD to develop a brain-computer interface for controlling robotic hands, which she won thanks to a collaboration with Sant'Anna in Pisa that she had created during her Master's thesis project. In 2009, she was given the opportunity to expand her work in the field of neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, where she learned to use a magnetic resonance machine and analyse the data collected during a neurofeedback experiment. She moved to the ETH Lausanne in 2012 to continue studying motor learning mechanisms in the brain to improve motor rehabilitation techniques after stroke.

In 2013, she married an American biomedical engineer who motivated her to move to the United States. In Boston she found her first job in pharma and devoted herself to a research project on multiple sclerosis. She now continues to contribute as a biomedical engineer in neurodegenerative diseases.

Maria Laura has a tireless positive energy that she tries to transmit in everything she does. She is often asked how she manages to reconcile being an engineer, wife, mother and daughter from a distance. Her answer is always the same: "I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul" (Ernest Henley)

Her passion for cooking has become almost an "obsession" overseas (you can imagine why :D), she loves the sea and nature walks. She founded a company with her husband called GioiaB., LLC that aims to provide strategies for discovering the mind-body balance that each of us needs to bring out the best in every situation.