Biography

I graduated in Chemical Engineering in 2002 from the University of Palermo, Italy, with a Master thesis on process control.

I defended my Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 2007 at the University Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain, under the supervision of Dr. Flor Siperstein and Dr. Allan Mackie, with a dissertation on self-assembling block copolymers for the synthesis of liquid-crystalline mesophases.

From 2007 to 2010, I was postdoctoral research associate at the Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science, Utrecht University, in the Soft Condensed Matter Group with Prof. Marjolein Dijkstra, where I focused my research on the isotropic-to-crystal phase transition in systems of colloidal rods and non-adsorbing polymer, and on the long-time structural relaxation decay and cooperative dynamics in colloidal LCs.

In 2010, I was awarded with a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship to work at the Institute of Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia (IQAC-CSIC), Barcelona, in the group of Prof. Conxita Solans on the confined self-assembly of amphiphiles in the continuous phase of highly concentrated emulsions.

In January 2014, I was appointed Lecturer in Chemical Engineering  in the School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science at The University of Manchester.