Cecilia Garlanda graduated in Veterinary Medicine, at the University of Milan, Italy. She worked at the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in the Laboratory of Immunology, Milan, Italy, from 1990 to 2005, and at the Département de Biologie Moléculaire et Structurale in Grenoble, France, in 1994- 1995. Since 2005, she is the Head of the Laboratory of Experimental Immunopathology of Humanitas Research Hospital and is currently Associate Professor of Clinical Pathology at Humanitas University, Milan, Italy. Scientific activity is documented by about 268 scientific publications on international journals, 17 chapters on scientific books; total H index 88; 31205 citations (Scopus).

Research interests regard innate immunity and regulation of inflammation in infections and cancer. She contributed to characterize a soluble mediator of innate immunity, the long pentraxin PTX3, a molecule involved in pathogen recognition and inflammation, and acting as prognostic and genetic biomarker in human infections. She characterized the biological activity of PTX3 in innate immune responses to pathogens of fungal, bacterial or viral origin, and in the regulation of inflammatory responses in the presence of pathogenic microorganisms or in condition of tissue damage and cancer. She also identified and characterized IL-1R8/SIGIRR, a member of the family of Interleukin-1Receptors/Toll Like Receptors. She showed that IL-1R8 is a negative regulator of inflammatory responses and leukocyte activation triggered by other members of the family, and is involved in different pathological conditions, including infections, inflammation and cancer. Finally, she contributed to dissect the role of humoral innate immunity in COVID-19, developing potential therapeutic molecules and prognostic markers.

Prof. Dr. Cecilia Garlanda