Giuseppe Firrao elected new president of the Italian Society of Plant Pathology

Professor Giuseppe Firrao of the University of Udine is the new president of the Italian Society of Plant Pathology (Sipav). He was elected by the Board of Directors of Italy’s most important scientific association in the field and will lead it for the three-year period 2026–2028. This is the first time that a professor from the University of Friuli has been appointed president of the Society. Firrao is full professor of Plant Pathology at the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Animal Sciences.
Giuseppe Firrao spent his entire academic career at the University of Udine, where he arrived from Milan in 1986, interrupted only by two sabbaticals in Davis, California. He coordinates the activities of an active research group and, in his scientific career, has been particularly interested in diseases caused by non-cultivable bacteria (giving rise to the genus “Candidatus Phytoplasma”), genomics and metagenomics in phytopathological contexts, and nanobiotechnology (developing a 48×14 nanometre nanorobot using the DNA origami technique, probably still the smallest controllable object in existence).