Marco Orecchioni PhD

Dr. Orecchioni, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of professor Klaus Ley, M.D., at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI), is a rising star at the Institute, having already notched a number of key research successes in a little over two years since he arrived in La Jolla after receiving his Ph.D. in his native Sardinia, an Italian island in the Mediterranean.

One of the signs that Dr. Orecchioni is an outstanding young talent came last year when he was awarded one of the Institute’s Tullie and Rickey Families SPARK Awards for Innovation in Immunology. SPARK awards provide $25,000 of flexible start-up funding so that young scientists just beginning their careers can launch their ideas and generate enough data to attract scientific grants enabling them to take their projects to the next level.

Dr. Orecchioni’s research expanded on the Institute’s discovery that olfactory receptors are not restricted to our nose but can be found in other parts of the body in the form of macrophages, a type of white blood cell.