Giulia Gaudenzi

Giulia is an assistant professor in the Department of Global Public Health and an affiliated fellow at the Division of Nanobiotechnology at SciLifeLab, KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on advancing point-of-care diagnostics for low-resource settings, aiming to improve healthcare accessibility globally.

She holds a fully funded international postdoctoral scholarship from the Swedish Research Council (VR) for development research and is part of the “HoliCARE” consortium, a Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Commission.

Giulia completed her Ph.D. at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, where she led numerous initiatives, including Global Health advocacy events such as co-founding Global Health Night, scientific seminar series, online courses, and public outreach activities. She co-developed the course “Gender, Health, and Rights”, based on Stanford University’s MOOC “International Women’s Health and Human Rights”.

In addition to her Ph.D., Giulia holds a Master of Laws (LLM) in Medical Law and Ethics from the University of Edinburgh. She is deeply committed to the equitable development of new technologies and serves as a board member of the Swedish Organization for Global Health, as well as a member of Karolinska Institutet’s Kulturrådet.

Notable merits:

• EIT Health DPhil/PhD Transition Fellowship, Silver Award
• Women in Global Health Sweden list
• Recipient of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) summer scholarship (2017)
• The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STING)'s Capstone Award
• EU “Year of Development” Grant for Global Health Night initiative
• Karolinska Institute’s travel grant
• Undergraduate’s Academic Scholarship “Giovanni Dalle Fabbriche” Foundation

Translational research within global health depends not only on developing novel technologies and therapies, but also in understanding the context and how to deliver it to the population in need. Crucial to the success of novel diagnostic system is the technological feasibility and acceptability to end-users. It is therefore not surprising that many diagnostic prototypes have failed at this stage, due to poor understanding of the context and of the end-users.

In our team we are interested in the development of low-cost diagnostics. We work closely with end-users to design and develop test having their 
perspectives directly at the development and implementation stage. In the quest to design low-cost and less invasive diagnostics, we also aim to 
investigate potential protein biomarkers that can characterize and distinguish between bacterial, viral and unclassified infections in children and determine the severity of the infections, using massive protein profiling.

Giulia is active in the Programmes of Biomedicine and in the SciLifeLab's Molecular Techniques in Life Science providing teaching, research placement, and support with the integration of Agenda 2030 in the Programmes. She is also contributing to the Master's Programme in Global Health as a master thesis examiner and providing research placements for the student theses.