Nicole Mariani is a research assistant in the Pixie Laboratory and the Stress, Psychiatry and Immunology Laboratory (SPI-Lab) at King's College London. She graduated in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology from the University of Milan in 2014 and joined the Pixie Lab and the SPI-lab groups in 2016. In 2020, she obtained an MSc in Neuroscience from King's College London. She currently works in clinical and in vitro studies investigating the role of neurogenesis as a biomarker for depression, in the context of inflammation. More specifically, she works on cellular models of neuroinflammation and stress, gene expression analyses, and biological clinical samples investigating the interaction between immune system activation and neurogenic alterations, as potential mediatory mechanisms involved in the pathophysiology of depression. She is fascinated by the biological aspects of psychiatric disorders and hopes that her research can help to better understand how the biological alterations in mental illnesses can improve pharmacological treatment.