Dr. Gaia Pigino is the Associate Head of the Centre for Structural Biology of the Human Technopole in Milan, Italy. Her team operates right at the interface between structural and molecular cell biology, using the latest methodologies from both fields to study the molecular machines required for the assembly and function of motile and primary cilia. Gaia received her PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Siena, Italy, in 2007 for her studies of bio-indicators of contaminated soils. Electron microscopy (EM) quickly became central in her research. After a short postdoc in the EM Lab of the University of Siena (2007-2009), Gaia moved to Switzerland where she worked at ETH Zurich and Paul Scherer Institute (PSI) to investigate the structure of ciliary components using cryo-EM (2009-2012). In 2012, Gaia became a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany, from where she recently moved to the Human Technopole in Milan.