Giuliano Bonfá holds a Bachelor's degree in Biochemistry from the Federal University of Viçosa (UFV-MG, Brazil, 2008), a Master of Science (2010) and PhD (2014) from the School of Medicine of Ribeirão Preto, University of São Paulo (FMRP/USP, Brazil), in the area of Basic and Applied Immunology (CAPES 7), where he investigated inflammatory pathways in host–pathogen interactions, focusing on CCR5, PPARalpha and gamma-mediated immune regulation in Toxoplasma gondii infection models.

Following his doctorate, he joined the Immuno-Oncology Department at MedImmune/AstraZeneca (Cambridge, UK, 2015–2016) through the Brazilian Science Without Borders programme, where he applied CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing to generate and characterise syngeneic preclinical models that are now embedded in the company's drug discovery portfolio. He subsequently held a postdoctoral position at the Immunochemistry Laboratory of Butantan Institute and CENTD - Centre of Excellence for New Target Discovery (São Paulo, Brazil, 2017–2019), investigating inflammatory signalling in 3D osteoarthritis models using human chondrocytes and animal venoms, and performing drug-target screening assays in THP-1 macrophage-like cells.

From 2019 to 2025, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Synthetic and Systems Biology for Biomedicine group at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT, Naples, Italy), where his work culminated in the design of novel synthetic promoter sensors integrated via lentiviral vectors into human CD8+ T cells to detect transcription factors associated with T cell exhaustion and trigger therapeutic responses — an advance in CAR-T cell engineering now patented in Italy (WO2024240850A1, pending worldwide) and under review at Nature Communications.

Since 2025, he is a Marie Skłodowksa Curie/MedTrain+ Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Ryan Tumor Immunology Lab and CÚRAM (SFI Research Centre for Medical Devices) at the University of Galway, Ireland. His current research engineers T and NK cells to target the Sialic Acid–Siglec axis for next-generation cellular immunotherapies against solid tumours. He is currently supervising two PhD students in next-generation cell therapy projects and serves as a peer reviewer for Toxicon and ACS Synthetic Biology.

Dr Giuliano's research sits at the intersection of synthetic immunology, gene circuit engineering, and immuno-oncology, with the long-term goal of developing tunable, context-responsive genetic programmes in immune cells for effective therapies against solid tumours.

Bonfá has accumulated substantial mentoring experience across multiple international research settings — supervising PhD students, master's candidates, and research fellows at IIT (2021–2025) and the University of Galway (2025–present). His teaching interests draw directly from his multidisciplinary scientific background and span foundational and advanced topics in biomedical science.