Giulia Menichetti
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menicgiulia.bsky.social
Giulia Menichetti
@menicgiulia.bsky.social
130 followers 43 following 29 posts
Physicist & Network Scientist 👩‍🔬 now diving into the chemical complexity of food
@harvardmed.bsky.social
Mass General Brigham
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menicgiulia.bsky.social
📣 🎙️ Recordings from #RiDaysEU: "Making the EU the most attractive place for Life Science" available here 👇
www.youtube.com/live/XWen3QB...

#LifeSciences
#Food2030EU
#OneHealth
#AIforHealth

@eu-life.bsky.social
@ec.europa.eu
@erc.europa.eu
September 30, 2025 at 10:20 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
A few shots from “Making the EU the most attractive place for Life Sciences” at the #EU Research & Innovation Days 2025. Looking forward to the next R&I agenda for the food systems! #RiDaysEU @eu-life.bsky.social @ec.europa.eu @erc.europa.eu
September 21, 2025 at 8:33 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
Join us for the European Research & Innovation Days 2025 (16–17 Sept, Brussels & online). I will be speaking at the plenary “Making the EU the Most Attractive Place for Life Sciences.

Register here 👇
🔗 research-innovation-community.ec.europa.eu/events/34Hci...
@ec.europa.eu @erc.europa.eu
August 29, 2025 at 1:22 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
Thank you, Cassandra, for having me on the Foodie Pharmacology Podcast!
👉 👇 Listen to our chat here 👇 👈
www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-zi...
August 20, 2025 at 1:09 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
This was fun! Today on @koreajoongangdaily.com

www.joongang.co.kr/article/2535...
July 15, 2025 at 12:14 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
Happening Today @ Precision Nutrition Forum and PREDIMED Omics Symposium 2025
@hsph.harvard.edu
👏@gordanaispirova.bsky.social 👏
June 10, 2025 at 7:00 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠 𝑖𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑎 𝑓𝑜𝑜𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑐𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑑?
We looked for answers through data science. Using multimodal AI models, we show the opportunities and limitations of current approaches.
📄 Read: arxiv.org/abs/2505.17087
💻 Code: github.com/menicgiulia/...
Example instance from the Open Food Facts dataset used in the training of the predictive models. The product name, ingredient list, and full nutrient panel (not fully shown here) are used to construct the input sentences for the LLM-based models. The nutrient panel shown includes the 11 nutrients used to train the FoodProX-based models. The last two quantitative indicators are used in the explanatory models. The number of additives is also included as an additional feature in one variant of the FoodProX model.
May 27, 2025 at 12:34 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
Interactive graphics available at www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....
May 7, 2025 at 10:35 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
Today, in Parma, at the heart of the food valley 😉
February 26, 2025 at 2:46 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
Thank you to Dr. Bruce Levy & the 2024 Chair’s Research Award organizers for a fantastic event! Transitioning from physics to medical research has been a journey made possible by a culture of mentorship & support. Grateful to Dr. Dawn DeMeo, my 'medicine teacher.' Congrats to all awardees!
January 24, 2025 at 6:55 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
Estimated reading time: 30 minutes.
Time to publication: 3 years 😅
'Prevalence of processed foods in major US grocery stores' is finally published in Nature Food!
Read it here: rdcu.be/d55mU
Thread coming soon 🧵—after I recover! 😉
January 13, 2025 at 2:59 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
Training course "Introduction to Network Medicine"
Join us! Applications are due by January 20!
👇 👇 👇 👇 👇 👇 👇 👇 👇 👇
www.diag.uniroma1.it/network_medi...
January 6, 2025 at 8:16 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
2/ Fast forward to today: My co-authors and I distilled this journey into "Decoding the Foodome: Molecular Networks Connecting Diet and Health" for @annualreviews.bsky.social
Perfect reading for New Year’s resolutions about rethinking diets & research 😉
👉 Read it here: shorturl.at/GQeaW
The dark matter of nutrition. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has systematically measured 188 nutritional components that encompass essential micro- and macronutrients related primarily to energy intake and vitamin deficiencies. Although this knowledge has been transformative for the health sciences, these nutritional components represent only a fraction of the more than 139,000 chemicals we have collected, many of which have documented effects. For example, the 69 nutrients documented by the USDA Standard Reference Legacy database for raw garlic include vitamins such as ascorbic acid and amino acids such as alanine but miss important bioactive compounds such as allicin, ajoene, and p-coumaric acid. The number of health effects/bioactivities documented in FooDB is shown for each compound. The network neighborhood of sulforaphane’s targets in the protein–protein interaction network generates a connected component comprising 49 targets, surrounded by 9 additional isolated targets. Green indicates both sulforaphane’s targets and the binding links connecting them. Gray indicates proteins close to sulforaphane’s targets. Within the same region of the interactome are proteins that are epigenetic modifiers (blue). Proteins that are both sulforaphane’s targets and associated with a therapeutic area are filled with the color of the selected therapeutic area, while their border is colored green.
December 30, 2024 at 4:33 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
1/ 🎉 Happy New Year, everyone! 8 years ago, I was brainstorming BIG nutrition questions with colleagues—little did I know it would lead me across fields like cheminformatics, epidemiology, mass spectrometry, stochastic modeling, AI, and Network Science.
Nutrient composition of food. According to the Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies, the consumption of 100 g of raw onion delivers 45 nutritional components, whose amounts (measured in grams) span eight orders of magnitude. Among these 45 nutrients are compounds from different chemical classes, such as copper (a mineral), linoleic acid (a polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acid, the most typical isomer of fatty acid 18:2), and quercetin (a flavonol). We rank the nutrients in onion in descending order of concentration on the ordinate axis. The gram amount of nutrient n per 100 g is reported as xn. Large-scale analysis of nutrient concentrations in food. (a) The concentration probability distribution Q(𝑥𝑛) for four nutrients across the 4,889 foods reported in NHANES 2009–2010 data, shown on a logarithmic horizontal axis. The four distributions are approximately symmetric on a log scale and have similar width and shape that are independent of the average concentration of the respective nutrient. Each symbol represents a histogram bin. (b,c) The observed common scale of nutrient fluctuations observed in the log space allows us to rescale all nutrients and compare them on a single plot, suggesting a methodology to detect foods with outlier concentrations. The pattern of nutrient outliers in different foods (quantified by a z score in the log space) is informative of the type and extent of processing, as shown here for (b) 100 g of raw onion compared with (c) 100 g of onion rings. (d,e) FoodProX is a random forest classifier that was trained over the nutrient concentrations within 100 g of each food, tasking the classifier to predict its processing level according to NOVA. FoodProX represents each food by a vector of probabilities {pi}, capturing the likelihood of the food being classified as an unprocessed food (NOVA 1), a processed culinary ingredient (NOVA 2), a processed food (NOVA 3), or an ultraprocessed food (NOVA 4). The final classification label, highlighted with a box on the right, is determined by the highest probability. The probability values were rounded to two decimal places.
December 30, 2024 at 4:33 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
Join us tomorrow in Rome!
November 21, 2024 at 4:10 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
A big thank you to the team behind the Festival of Italian Creativity @ItalyinBoston. Special thanks to Consul General @ArnaldoMinuti and Prof. @paologau for the opportunity to join the panel on Women in Science and Technology.
#ItalyinBoston
November 20, 2024 at 8:28 PM
menicgiulia.bsky.social
About last week…hopefully the first of a long series of panels on #AI & #Food! 🙌 Big Thank you 🙌 to Erika Marthins, Johnny Drain, UN @aiforgood.bsky.social
#UN #aiforgood
November 19, 2024 at 3:00 PM