Carmen Faso graduated summa cum laude in Biological Sciences from the Third University of Rome in 2003. She obtained her PhD in Natural Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and then proceeded with a first postdoctoral position at Michigan State University in the field of plant cell biology. In 2010, Carmen moved back to Switzerland, this time at the University of Zurich, and fell in love with protist parasites and their incredible cell and molecular biology. She pursued her love of everything Giardia and established her own group at the University of Bern in 2019 as a Swiss National Foundation PRIMA Professor. Since then, Carmen has added leadership of the medical parasitology group and the newly-established Multidisciplinary Center for Infectious Diseases, all at the University of Bern.