Dr Monti is a Lecturer within the School of Chemistry at the University of Melbourne, and a group leader at the Bio21 Institute. She is an expert in medicinal chemistry, drug discovery, and nucleic acid biology.
Dr Monti received a Master's degree in Pharmacy (2014) and a PhD in Life Sciences (2018) from Sapienza University of Rome (Italy). She conducted her PhD studies in the USA where she trained as a medicinal chemist in chemistry laboratories of Prof. Amos B. Smith and Prof. Carlo Ballatore at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California San Diego. The outstanding research she conducted as a graduate student in the drug discovery field for cancer, Alzheimer's disease and neglected tropical diseases was recognised with the prestigious Minerva Award by Sapienza University. Furthermore, she was awarded the Young Investigator Scholarship by the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (USA) for her work on her work on multi-target imidazole as novel candidate treatments for neurodegenerative diseases. Finally, her PhD thesis was published as an open-access book upon receiving the award for Best PhD Thesis 2020 by Sapienza University Publishing.
In 2018, Dr Monti joined the biology laboratory of Dr. Conor Caffrey at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) as a Post-doctoral researcher. She applied organic chemistry and biological assays to characterise the in vitro and in vivo activity of microtubule-targeting small molecules. Her studies contributed to the discovery and development of novel candidate treatments for parasitic diseases, including African sleeping sickness and schistosomiasis. As an affiliated member of the Center for Discovery and Innovation in Parasitic Diseases at UCSD, Ludovica continues to contribute to and support novel discoveries against neglected infectious diseases.
In 2021, Dr Monti was awarded the prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship and joined the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London (UK). Supported by the expertise of the Di Antonio group, Ludovica developed new DNA-based molecular and bioinformatic approaches to characterise DNA secondary structures in the parasitic agent, Trypanosoma brucei.
In 2024, Dr Monti joined The University of Melbourne as a Lecturer in Chemistry. As a group leader at the Bio21 Institute, her team works on developing novel cutting-edge chemical-genomic approaches that target DNA to study new mechanisms of disease driving host-parasitic interactions.

Dr

Ludovica Monti

Lecturer

School of Chemistry

Dr

Ludovica Monti

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Faculty of Science

Primary Interest

Biological characterisation of active molecules

Dr

Ludovica Monti

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