Marita Bosticardo obtained her Master’s Degree in Biology and her Ph.D. in Immunology both at University of Torino in Italy. She did her Post Doctoral training at NHGRI, NIH, where she started working on rare diseases and her work has been ever since focused on gaining a better understanding of the pathogenesis of Primary Immunodeficiencies (PIDs) and on the development of gene therapy-based innovative therapeutic approaches for these diseases. In 2006, she moved to HSR-TIGET in Milan and continued working on in vitro and in vivo models of gene therapy, focusing on the evaluation of safety and efficacy of a gene therapy approach for Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome (WAS). In 2011, she spent several months in the laboratory of Georg Hollander (Basel, CH), where she gained the expertise on thymic epithelial cell (TEC) isolation, characterization and culture. Since then, the study of thymus biology in PIDs, before and after gene correction, and the development of innovative therapies for the treatment of these diseases, including thymus engineering have been the focus of her research. In April 2017, she obtained the position of Staff Scientist in the laboratory of Dr. Luigi D. Notarangelo (NIAID, NIH) and moved back to the NIH, where her research aims at studying the pathophysiology of primary immunodeficiencies (PID), with a special focus on the characterization of defects of T-cell development and thymic abnormalities. In particular, one of her main goals is to characterize how defects in thymocyte development and/or in TEC affect their cross-talk and ultimately impact on thymic functionality and on the development of T cell immunity.