About me
Grassitelli, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (resized, cropped) I grew up in the province of Turin, Italy, and studied Physical Engineering for my bachelor’s. 
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (resized, cropped) Then two things happened: I came across Richard Feynman’s famous line, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom”, and I saw an exhibition of microfabricated objects. I was hooked, and went on to a master’s in micro- and nanotechnologies. It was an international program between Turin, Grenoble and Lausanne, and it gave me a passion for traveling and moving abroad.
For my master’s thesis I was lucky to join Prof. Sia’s group at Columbia University in New York. I spent a year there working on point-of-care diagnostic devices for resource-limited settings, including three weeks of field testing in Rwanda, an unforgettable experience.
A.Savin, FAL, via Wikimedia Commons (resized, cropped) Back in Europe, I joined Prof. Burg’s lab (now at TU Darmstadt) at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, now part of the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences. There I worked on a new way to measure the mass of biomolecular complexes and nanoparticles in solution, using cantilever resonators with a microfluidic channel built inside. Göttingen also gave me two new passions: analog photography and biking.
© ETH Zurich, via D-BSSE (resized, cropped) Then it was time to learn more biology and to move from small complexes to large cellular aggregates. I joined Prof. Hierlemann’s Bio Engineering Laboratory at ETH Zurich in Basel, where I put my fabrication and sensor know-how to work on advanced platforms for microtissues. I planned to stay a couple of years and ended up staying ten: first learning the ropes of microtissue culture, then leading the team’s research for over seven years.
Meanwhile, life outside the lab moved on too. I got married and became the lucky father of three fantastic girls. Photography and biking have had to be scaled back a little, but there is never a shortage of projects with them.