I am an interdisciplinary biophysicist interested in Microscopy, Quantitative Bioimage Analysis, Microfluidics, Organs-On-Chip, and Machine Learning. My doctoral studies were in novel technologies for imaging, as part of a joint program between the University of Naples Federico II and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Following this, I spent 11 years at Harvard University, beginning in the Schonbrun Lab at the Rowland Institute, where I developed microscopy systems for imaging flow cytometry. Subsequently, I transitioned to the Kirchhausen Lab as junior faculty at the Harvard Medical School - Boston Children's Hospital, focusing on implementing computational solutions for quantifying biological data from 4D fluorescent- and 3D electron-microscopy. In 2023, I was appointed as Senior Lecturer and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Strathclyde.

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Cell engineering is predicted to be part of a regenerative medicine focused future. The human Mesenchymal Stem Cells (hMSC) are a cell type of major interest that are available from bone marrow, adipose tissue, and umbilical cord sources. Over 900 hMSC clinical trials have been conducted since 2004 and thousands of academic publications on potential hMSC treatments are published yearly. Despite this significant investigative effort, only few therapeutic products containing hMSCs or their derivative cells are approved yearly, mainly due to hMSC therapies requiring extensive safety testing by an independent contract research organization, sterile cold chain, and increased surgical time.

Our goal is to introduce a completely new paradigm in stem cell culturing where the standard trial and error approach to identify a suitable recipe is substituted by quantitative and continuous optimization. We intend to implement a next-generation bio-manufacturing process in which the stimulation is finely tuned in real time, based on the specific dynamics of the population, to overcome the issues associated with biological diversity and patient-specific conditions. The possibilities to combine different imaging technologies, to trigger imaging modalities based on the real-time image analysis results, and to synchronize image acquisition with external devices for sample manipulation (i.e., liquid handling or cell manipulation) enable the automation of complex workflows.

Quantitative Absorption Microscopy - A Circulatory System on Chip

This project is dedicated to the development of material technologies for mimicking the environment of the Circulatory System on Chip. In addition to the organ-on-chip fabrication, I am interested in performing quantitative measurements of other physical characteristics of cells, such as volume, protein mass, and oxygen tension. Resolving the distribution of different measured parameters enables better understanding of not only mean values of a cell population but also subtle differences in the response of each cell to its environment, genetic differences, and exposure to small molecules.