Dr. Luciani received her B.S in chemical engineering from Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata in 2001 and PhD in chemical engineering from Universidad Nacional del Litoral in 2006. She spent several years at the University of Maryland, initially as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a research professor.
She joined Small Molecule Design and Development at Eli Lilly in 2011 as a process engineer. In 2014, she joined the process design and development group as the leader of the drug substance M&S group. In that role, she guided a group of chemical engineers and developed models for hybrid and continuous drug substance processes.
She became an engineer advisor in 2016 and the leader of Future Manufacturing Platforms' innovation capability in 2017. Future Manufacturing Platforms' main objective was to identify, design, develop and test new manufacturing platforms and ensure that chemistry, formulation, engineering, and analytical solutions can meet future manufacturing needs for both drug substance and drug product for synthetic molecules (inducing small molecules and novel modalities). In this role, she has supported innovation by identifying new technologies. She has also helped established collaborations with academia and contract research organizations and promoted the implementation of innovation for the manufacturing.
In 2019, she led the RNA-therapeutics team at Lilly Cambridge Innovation Center.
In 2020, she joined Vertex Pharmaceuticals and she is currently a Sr. Director of chemical engineering leading development of small molecules drug substance programs. At AIChE, she is currently the chair elect for the Pharmaceutical Discovery, Development and Manufacturing Forum (PD2M Marketing).
She was awarded with the Outstanding Contribution to QbD for Drug Substance in 2020.