Laura Volta

Biography
Laura Volta, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Saar Gill at the University of Pennsylvania, where she develops next-generation cellular immunotherapies for cancer. Her work focuses on strategies that make engineered T-cell therapies more flexible, controllable, and effective, particularly for acute myeloid leukemia and other diseases in which safe, durable target selection remains difficult. Before joining Penn in 2025, Dr. Volta trained in Zurich, where she studied adaptor CAR T-cell platforms and bispecific immune engagers for AML in the laboratory of Markus Manz. She earned her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences at ETH Zurich under Dario Neri, investigating antibody-based approaches for leukemia, after earlier training in biomedical engineering and antibody-drug conjugates in Italy. Her research combines antibody engineering, T-cell biology, translational disease models, and therapeutic design. A central goal is to build modular immune-cell platforms that can recognize clinically important targets while improving safety and adaptability as tumors evolve.