Principal Investigator Ph.D Livia Sima

Livia Sima studied biochemistry at the University of Bucharest from where she obtained her bachelor degree in 2003. Immediately thereafter she joined Stefana Petrescu’s group in the Institute of Biochemistry. She was trained in protein folding using tyrosinase as a model protein. In parallel, she continued her master studies in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Bucharest. During her PhD training under Dr. Petrescu’s supervision, Livia worked on two main directions:
1) molecular characterisation of melanoma cell lines expressing the pro-angiogenic chemokine GCP-2
and 2) in vitro osteogenic differentiation of human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells onto biomaterials designed for prosthetic applications. She was involved in extensive fluorescence microscopy work and successfully implemented flow cytometry methods in IB-AR.

Livia received her PhD degree in 2012 from the Romanian Academy.
In 2016 she joined Daniela Matei’s group at Northwestern University in Chicago, USA. As a Postdoctoral Fellow, she investigated the role of tissue transglutaminase (TG2) in modulating the anti-tumour immune response in mouse models of ovarian cancer and tested small molecule inhibitors targeting TG2-fibronectin interaction. Livia returned to IB-AR in 2018 with a keen interest in investigating context-dependent cell signaling in the tumour microenvironment and developing new methods related to cancer research.

She is currently team leader within TERAMED grant: “Integrated development project for advanced medical treatment technologies” (PN-III-P1-1.2-PCCDI-2017-0728) and principal investigator of the TG2TARGET (PN-III-P1-1.1-TE- 2019-0670) and TG2THERAPY (PN-III-P2-2.1-PED- 2019-1543) research grants.


Livia Sima is the Secretary of the Romanian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (since 2015), Associate Member of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) (since 2017) and Member of the Romanian Cytometry Association (ACR) (since 2011).