Dr. Barra is a senior postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University with a strong background in molecular biology of cancer and immunology. Her current research - funded by the Rally! Foundation for Childhood Cancer - focusses on the pursuit of novel immunotherapy interventions for the childhood cancers that recur, and which are the most difficult to treat with traditional chemotherapy.

As a postdoctoral fellow she has, among other projects: investigated the role of innate immunity as a key modulator of interferon response to viral infections and to oncolytic virus-based immunotherapy, and developed novel computational approaches to analyze complex multi-omics data. Currently, she is employing multi-omics approaches coupled with spatial transcriptomics to investigate the interplay between the immune and tumor microenvironments within the context of Wilms Tumor, the most common extra-cranial solid malignancy of childhood.

Dr. Barra obtained a Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from KU Leuven-VIB (Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie, Belgium) where she studied the role of the long non-coding RNA NEAT1 and chemosensitivity of epithelial cancers. Prior to this, she obtained a BSc and MSc (Summa cum Laude) from the University of Milan – Bicocca (Italy). Dr. Barra has an extensive international research portfolio that includes visiting fellowships at the Biotech Research and Innovation Center of Copenhagen (Denmark), the European Institute of Oncology (Italy) and at the Leiden University Medical Center (The Netherlands).