Guido Dorso Prize for Serena Sanna

Departmental researcher Dr. Serena Sanna has been awarded a 2018 Guido Dorso prize for excellence in research in recognition of the contribution her work has made to the regional development and progress of the southern region of Italy, the Mezzogiorno, which includes the island of Sardinia. The Guido Dorso prizes are awarded to young researchers and other cultural figures who have “contributed to their activities to sustain the needs of development and progress of the South”.

Sanna was awarded her PhD from the Department of Genetics at the University of Groningen in 2016, and she has since then joined our department to work on the genetics of the LifeLines cohort. Since ten years prior, Dr. Sanna has been a researcher at the Institute of Neurogenetics and Neuropharmacology from the National Research Council (CNR) in Cagliari, Sardinia, where she developed an international reputation as biostatistician working on unravelling the genetics of complex traits in very unique Sardinian population cohorts. This work has contributed to >150 publications and has put the Sardinian genetics projects on the map.

The Guido Dorso prizes, which have been given yearly since 1970, are sponsored by the Senate of the Republic of Italy, the Italian National Research Council and the University of Naples "Federico II". The prizes will be presented on Thursday 11 October in the Zuccari Hall of the Palace Giustiniani in Rome

For more information about the Sardinia study see https://sardinia.nia.nih.gov/

For more information about the Guido Dorso Association and the prize see http://www.assodorso.it/ilpremio.htm

Press release about this year’s prize (in Italian): https://www.cnr.it/it/evento/15876/al-senato-la-consegna-del-premio-guido-dorso