Pizzo's interdisciplinary research work, under the direction of Professors Klod Kokini and Sherry Voytik-Harbin, has significant contributions to the areas of biotechnology and medicine. The long-range goal of her work is to establish design criteria for engineering scaffolds to be used clinically to guide human tissue repair and replacement. Their research group recently established for the first time that changes in the 3D microstructural composition of the tissue extracellular matrix is a critical determinant of cell response. Implications of this finding are that adult stem cells, which possess the ability to differentiate into varous cell types such as muscle, fat, cartilage, or bone, can be grown in different 3D microenvironments and consequently form into different tissue types. This research has very high potential for success and may result in future patents.

The Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation was founded n 1992 at the initiative of Professor Dimitris N. Chorafas. Each year the Foundation selects approximately 20 universities worldwide to receive the award, whose goal is to stimulate promising young researchers. This year's list of universities included the University of London (England), EPFL Lausanne (Switzerland), Erasmus University (Netherlands), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), George Washington University (USA), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), Hiroshima University (Japan), Karolinska Institute (Sweden), MIT (USA), Politechnico di Milano (Italy), Technical University of Athens (Greece), Technical University of Berlin (Germany), Technical University of Munich (Germany), Tokyo University of Technology (Japan), UCLA (USA), University of Toronto (Canada), Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), and Purdue University (USA).