Fouzia Bano, a former ICTP Diploma student from Pakistan, has received a Premio Borsellino prize from the Italian Society of Pure and Applied Biophysics (SIBPA) for her thesis titled "Towards Single Cell Genomics and Proteomics: New Methods in Nanoscale Surface Biochemistry."

Bano studied condensed matter physics at ICTP from 2004 to 2005. After that she was immediately accepted into a doctoral programme at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), where she received a PhD in 2009.

She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Liège in Belgium. She researches molecule-molecule and molecule-metal interactions via single-molecule spectroscopy, an Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM)-based technique used to explore the nature of interactions between molecules and surfaces.

"The technique has provided new pathways to assemble and investigate biological networks, such DNA/lipid or protein/cell complexes," said Bano, adding, "To probe the nature of bio-molecule interactions, such as DNA, with solid substrate of different properties (which is gold in my case) is the major focus of my research at present."