Alessia is a Research Assistant in the Biochemical Engineering Department, working in the groups of Dr Jack Jeffries and Prof Helen Hailes on discovering and characterising enzymes for plastic degradation as part of the UKRI P3EB (Preventing Plastic Pollution with Engineering Biology) Mission Hub. She is completing her PhD through the Marie Curie ITN “CC-TOP”, focusing on genome and metagenome mining to identify and characterise split transketolases. Before joining UCL, Alessia spent five months at the Biocatalysis Group of the University of Graz, Austria, through the Erasmus+ traineeship programme, working on a two-step enzymatic cascade. She holds a Master’s degree in Industrial Biotechnology from the University of Padova, Italy, and a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology from the University of Brescia, Italy.