Draft:Laura Finzi

Laura Finzi is an Italian-American biophysicist whose research includes single-molecule experiments and modelling to explain mechanisms of transcriptional regulation. She is a Professor of Physics at Emory University.

Education
Finzi received her Laurea in industrial chemistry from the University of Bologna in 1984. She then moved to the United States and completed a PhD in Chemistry at the University of New Mexico in 1990.

Career
In 1991, Finzi began as a post-doctoral fellow in the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Oregon under the supervision of Carlos Bustamante. In 1992, She joined the biochemistry department as a post-doctoral fellow at Brandeis University under the supervision of Jeff Gelles. In 1993, she became a researcher in the biology department at the University of Milan and was offered tenure in 1996. In 2005, Finzi joined the faculty of the physics department at Emory University, becoming a full professor in 2012.

At Emory, Finzi is an affiliate faculty member of the department of chemistry and of the Emory–Georgia Tech biomedical engineering graduate program. She is a member of the Executive Council of the Senate of the Emory College of Arts and Sciences (ECAS), a member of the Emory College Faculty Senate Executive Committee, and founding chair of the Emory DEI committee. In the 2024-2025 academic year, she will serve as President of the faculty Senate of ECAS. In 2016, she co-founded Women in Science at Emory (WiSE) which received the Emory Program of the Year Award in 2019. She is an Editorial Board member of Biophysics Reviews. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for "pioneering work on magnetic tweezers to resolve the difference between full polymer elastic theory and the simplifying freely jointed chain model and to demonstrate the key role of DNA supercoiling in transcription regulation, and for using tethered particle motion to study genetic switches."