Biography

I was born and raised in Teramo, a small city in central Italy (Abruzzo). I was educated in a technical institute (ITIS E. Alessandrini) where I have been exposed to chemistry for the very first time. Back then my chemistry teacher (Graziella D'Ambrosio) and my father, an entrepreneur, had a profound influence on my formation and it soon became pretty clear to me that I wanted to be a chemist and lead a research group.

I gained a MSci degree in Organic Chemistry from University of Pavia in 2007, where I also met my wife Claudia. I then obtained a PhD in Molecular Sciences from Padua University under the supervision of Prof. Manlio Palumbo and Prof. Mauro Freccero in 2011, before moving to the UK, in Cambridge, in February of the same year. In Cambridge I worked with Prof. Shankar Balasubramanian  for 7 years. The time spent as a member of the  Balasubramanian group  made me fully develop scientific independence. In Cambridge, I had the opportunity to stretch my comfort zone from pure synthetic organic chemistry all the way to molecular and cell biology, which is now embedded in the highly multidisciplinary type of research that is performed in my group.

In December 2017 I was awarded a prestigious BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship, which has enabled me to move to Imperial College Department of Chemistry and start my current research group In 2018. In 2022 I was appointed permanent Lecturer at Imperial and I started a satellite group at The Francis Crick Insitute. In 2022, I was also awarded a Lister Insitute Research Prize to develop optical tools to control epigenetic resistance in ovarian cancer.

Generally speaking, my research vision is based on the use of chemistry in the context of biology and genomics, with the aim to develop novel technologies to study cancer and ageing biology from a fresh perspective.