Anna Bernasconi is Tenure Track Assistant Professor (RTT) at Politecnico di Milano. She received the B.S. degree in Mathematical Engineering in 2012 and the M.S. degree in Computer Engineering in 2015, both from the Politecnico di Milano. She has a Master in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago. After 2-years experience in Business Intelligence consulting, she pursued the Ph.D. degree (cum laude) in Information Technology from Politecnico di Milano, advised by Prof. Stefano Ceri and Alessandro Campi, defending the thesis "Model, Integrate, Search... Repeat: a Sound Approach to Building Integrated Repositories of Genomic Data" in 2021, winning the Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award 2021, as well as the "Best Ph.D. thesis award on Big Data & Data Science" from the CINI Big Data Lab and the CAiSE PhD Award. She was visiting postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Politecnica de Valencia from January to June 2022.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of Bioinformatics, Databases, and Data Science Methods, where she applies conceptual modeling, data integration, and knowledge engineering in several life sciences and other applied sciences domains, with a focus on building open-source tools and services.
She authored more than 45 journal papers and 30 conference/workshop proceedings papers, as well as 10 book chapters. She collaborates with several scholars from other national and international institutions; she is Principal Investigator of the MUR PRIN PNRR 2022 project SENSIBLE (Small-data Early warNing System for viral pathogens In puBLic hEalth, 2023-2025) and of the EU-funded NGI Search project TETYS (Topics Evolution That You See, 2023-2024). She is involved as Task leader in the Horizon Europe BETTER project (2023-2027), EU4Health UNICA project (2025-2029), and in the NextGenerationEU program FAIR project (Future Artificial Intelligence Research, 2023-2025). Previously, she was WP leader in the GeCo (data-driven Genomic Computing) ERC Advanced Grant project (2016-2021) led by Prof. Stefano Ceri, and she was Task leader in the EIT Digital "Data against COVID-19" Innovation Activity 'Virusurf' (2020). She actively engages with the conceptual modeling, database, and bioinformatics research communities with several paper presentations, Programme Committees service, commitment as Program Chair in ER 2026 and IEEE BigDataService 2023, organization of two tutorials (ER and EDBT conferences), and four workshops on conceptual models, web applications for life sciences, and transforming graphs (ER, ICWE, CAiSE, EDBT conferences). She is an academic editor in Plos One, BMC Bioinformatics, Nature Scientific Data, for which she also organized supplement issues and guest edited collections. In 2025 she co-founded the LegisRatio s.r.l. startup (a Politecnico di Milano spin-off) and in 2026 she received the Early Career Investigator Award of the Viruses journal.