Mariafrancesca Scalise is associate professor in Biochemistry in the Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Molecular Biotechnologies Unit, at University of Calabria.  She is involved in the study of plasma membrane, lysosomal and vesicular transporters of amino acids. In 2009 and 2010, she worked for the WHO in Lyon (France) where she was involved in the study of transforming properties of HPVs. Mariafrancesca Scalise supervised several undergraduate students for bachelor and master thesis. Her research interests in membrane transporters is linked to several aspects of metabolism in health and diseases with particular reference to absorption, distribution and excretion of nutrients and drugs. The study of transporters is conducted using substrates labelled with radioisotopes or fluorescent molecules. By combined approaches of bioinformatics and site-directed mutagenesis, structure/function relationships studies are possible, to identify critical residues for protein activity. Cell biology approaches allow performing studies on transporter trafficking and expression levels in normal and cancerous tissue clarifying aspects still unknown. This research field has the scope if identification of new therapeutic targets and of protocols for large-scale screening of drugs in order to improve drug design. Mariafrancesca Scalise has several international collaborations, among which the University of Canterbury in New Zealand for the functional characterization of bacterial membrane transporters of sialic acid involved in the antimicrobial resistance. Mariafrancesca Scalise is co-author of more than 70 publications, among which relevant papers on Nature Communication, Scientific Reports and Cell; Mariafrancesca Scalise is member of several scientific communities and of the editorial board of peer review journals.