Born, raised and educated in Malta, it was a natural decision for Emma Spiteri to continue her postgraduate studies at the University of Malta. Her EMBO Scientific Exchange Grant placement in Rome enabled her to learn new skills to apply in her home lab.
“I would strongly encourage other students in Malta to apply for this grant. It is an exceptional opportunity to access expertise, technologies and collaborations which might not be available locally,” she says.
Spiteri says the exchange helped her professional and personal growth. “Seeing other labs and speaking with other students, on both professional and personal level, was important and enjoyable,” she says.
Spiteri has completed undergraduate and Masters’ degrees, and she is now in the second year of her PhD studies at the University of Malta. Her EMBO Scientific Exchange Grant funded a two-week visit to the laboratory of Carmine Carbone at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Rome.
“The EMBO grant was not just funding for a short-term visit but also a turning point in both my research and professional development,” she says. “This exchange is already instrumental to the progress of my PhD. It is very important to choose your host lab carefully to ensure your project is complementary and beneficial to your own research.”
Spiteri says her research is at the intersection of cancer biology and bioinformatics. “My focus is on pituitary neuroendocrine tumors which are the second most common type of primary brain tumors,” Spiteri says. “I am applying a multiomics approach to explore genes and cells within these tumors.”
She used the EMBO exchange to gain hands-on experience in the field of spatial transcriptomics using Xenium. This activity also exposed her to new wet lab learning opportunities.
“The collaboration with the Carbone lab is ongoing and we are working on a joint publication,” she says. “It is a technique that I hope to eventually bring to the University of Malta more widely.”
Although she did not commence her research as a bioinformatician, Spiteri realizes she is living through a turning point in the application of larger scale data analysis to the life sciences.
“The University of Malta is relatively small, and the change is already significant”, Spiteri says. “Researchers are now working with data on much larger scales than before. Even as a second-year PhD student, I can already see how bioinformatics is opening up new opportunities across healthcare, research, and industry”.
