Ivan Zadra was born in Italy in the heart of Dolomites. He faced research for the first time at CIBIO in Trento, where he was into a project trying to understand the neuronal development in mice affected by autism-like diseases. During this period the University of Trento gave him a merit award for his bachelor’s thesis work. In 2016 he got his Master’s degree in Medical Biotechnology at the University of Padova after developing a bioinformatics approach for analysing the genomic rearrangements occurring in cancer cells.

In his spare-time he likes to do sports. He practices boxing but he also enjoys snowboarding and climbing.