Valentina Cauda is Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Science and Technology (DISAT), Politecnico di Torino, co-founder of the Interdepartmetal laboratory PolitoBIOMed Lab and head of the TrojaNanoHorse lab (in brief TNHLab) located at DISAT. See more details at https://areeweb.polito.it/TNHlab/.
Thanks to her ERC Starting Grant project (TrojaNanoHorse, GA 678151), started in March 2016, she now leads a multidisciplinary research group of 18 people, including chemists, biologists, physics, engineers and nanotechnologists. Her main research topic is about theranostic nanomaterials, from wet synthesis, chemical functionalization and physical-chemical characterization of metal oxide nanomaterials covered by lipidic bilayer from both artificial and natural origins, aimed for drug delivery, tumor cell targeting, bio-imaging. Metal oxide nanomaterials, like zinc oxide, mesoporous silica, titania and metal (gold, silver) nanostructures, as well as liposomes and cell-derived extracellular vesicles, are investigated.
Valentina Cauda graduated in Chemical Engineering in 2004 at Politecnico di Torino and then received her Ph.D. in Material Science and Technology in 2008. After a short period at the University of Madrid, she worked as a post-doc at the University of Munich, Germany on nanoparticles for drug delivery and tumor cell targeting. From 2010 to 2015 she worked as Senior Post Doc at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Torino, and then she moved, as Associate Professor, to Politecnico di Torino. For her research results she received in 2010 the prize for young researchers at the Chemistry Department of the University of Munich, in 2013 the Giovedì Scienza award, in 2015 the Zonta Prize for Chemistry, and in 2017 the USERN Prize for Biological Sciences. She has 120 scientific publications and a Hirsch Factor of 37 (updated on April 2021). She holds 6 international patents about the use of metal oxide nanoparticles in nanomedicine.
Prof. Cauda is principal investigator of several industrial, national and international projects raising more than 2 M€ funds in all. The most relevant are a recently granted FET OPEN RIA MIMIC-KeY (GA N. 964386), the ERC Proof-of-Concept XtraUS N. 957563, a Marie-Slodowska Curie Action MINT N. 842964 (where she acts as supervisor of an incoming Post-Doc from abroad), and the ERC Starting Grant Trojananohorse N. 678151
Paula Marques (born 1969) has a first degree in Chemistry (1993), a MSc in Chemistry and Physics Teaching (1997) and a PhD in Materials Science Engineering, with specialization in Biomaterials (2003) from the University of Aveiro (UA) in Portugal.
Paula is a Principal Researcher at TEMA – Centre for Mechanical Technology and Automation, Mechanical Engineering Department, UA. Currently is the Deputy-Director for Society and Social Responsibility in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Sub-Director of the research unit TEMA (Centre of Mechanical Technology and Automation) board of Directors, responsible for new areas of specialization.
Her current research interests include the engineering and development of nanostructured multifunctional materials including graphene derivatives such as: (i) mechanical and electrical stimulus responsive 3D graphene-based scaffolds for tissue engineering; (ii) functional graphene-based macrostructures for water remediation; (iii) electrospun graphene/polymer fibres for photocatalysis; (iv) graphene-based materials as mechanical reinforcement of polymer matrixes.
Paula is author of 77+ original research or review papers in international journals (2900+ citations, h=28 – Scopus), about 7 book chapters, 2 books and 3 patents. Paula has been invited to review manuscripts from 30+ different international journals and to evaluate projects from Cost and Era-Net funding agencies. Paula supervised or co-supervised 10 MSc, 12 PhD students, and 8+ post-doctoral fellows. Since April 2019 she is coordinating a FET Open H2020 project, “NeuroStimSpinal: A Step Forward to Spinal Cord Injury Repair Using Innovative Stimulated Nanoengineered Scaffolds". She is also coordinating and co-coordinating several Portuguese Projects obtaining under competitive funding.
Regarding Paula’s pedagogical role, she is the teacher in charge for the 3rd cycle curricular unit Carbon Nanostructures, and teacher of the 2nd cycle curricular unit Technologies and Processes at Nanoscale.
Prof. Dr. İsmail Tuncer DEGIM graduated from Ankara University Faculty of Pharmacy in 1985. He completed his master's degree at Gazi University Faculty of Pharmacy in 1988. He completed his doctoral dissertation in 1996 at Cardiff University, Cardiff School of Pharmacy, University of Wales in England. He became a full Professor at Gazi University Faculty of Pharmacy in 2009 and served as the Dean of Gazi University Faculty of Pharmacy between 2012-2016. He has been working at Biruni University Faculty of Pharmacy since 2016. He is currently serving as a Dean.
He has more than 55 national and international articles; He has various book chapters, has been on the referee boards of Hacettepe University Journal of the Faculty of Pharmacy, Journal of Biophysical Chemistry and is currently in the referee board of the journals Pharmaceutical Science and Technology, Asian Chemistry Letters, Austin Chromatography, ACTA Pharmaceutica Sciencia, Pharmaceutical Drug Regulatory Affairs Journal. Turkey clinics and serves on the Advisory Board of the Journal of Pharmacy Sciences.
He supervised 11 master's and doctoral theses and worked as an executive or researcher in 16 Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey projects and various scientific projects. He has many patents, such as 1Method for measuring blood urea level by reverse iontophoresis1, (US7231242, EP1526891, AT480296, CN100431641), 1Cartridge for electrohmodialysi1s (US8057680, RU2323015, TR200401118, CN100518837), 1Extended release fluvastatin tablet1 (TR200800634)He had Novartis publication award in 2005 (Third prize, "T. DEĞIM, J. HADGRAFT, S. ILBASMIS, Y. OZKAN," Prediction of skin penetration using artificial neural network (ANN) modeling ", J. Pharm. Sci., 92: 656-664 (2003). He also received the Pharmacy Award of Mustafa Nevzat Pharmaceuticals in 2012 with PhD student Sibel İlbasmış Tamer for her phD thesis.
Prof.Dr. I. Tuncer Degim has been working with controlled release systems, iontophoresis, passage of active substances through the skin, drug formulations, generic formulation development, application of optimization techniques to pharmaceutical technology, nanotechnology, aerospace pharmacy, carbon nanotubes, boron nitrite nanotubes and quantum dots.
Albert van den Berg received his MSc in applied physics in 1983, and his PhD in 1988 both at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. From 1988-1993 he worked in Neuchatel, Switzerland, at the CSEM and the University (IMT) on miniaturized chemical sensors. In 2000 he was appointed as full professor on Miniaturized Systems for (Bio)Chemical Analysis in the faculty of Electrical Engineering and part of the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology. In 1994 he initiated together with Prof. Bergveld the international MicroTAS conference series. He published over 500 peer reviewed publications (H=64 WoS, H=86 Google Scholar) a.o. in Science, Nature, PNAS, PRL, Angewandte, NanoLetters, ACS Nano etc, and from his group > 10 spin-off companies started. He received several honors and awards such two ERC Advanced (2008, 2015) and four ERC Proof of Concept (2011, 2013, 2016, 2020) grants, Simon Stevin award (engineering sciences, 2002), Spinoza prize (2009), Distinguished University Professor (Twente, 2010), Distinguished Professor (South China Normal University SNCU (China), 2012), Consulting Professor at Northwestern Polytechnic University NPU (China), 2017) and member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW) (board member from 2011-2016). From 2014-2018 he was scientific director of the MIRA institute for Biomedical Engineering. In 2017 he became co-PI of the Max Planck - University of Twente Center for Complex Fluid Dynamics. In 2018 he became (co)director of MESA+ institute for Nanotechnology. He has been editor of Sensors and Actuators B, cofounding member of the editorial board of the RSC journal Lab on a Chip, founding member of EUROoCS, the European Organ on Chip Society and founding director of the CBMS, the Chemical and Biological Microsystems Society. His current research interests are micro/nanofluidics and sensing for health and sustainability and organs on chip.
Francesca Granucci obtained the PhD in Pharmacology and toxicology in 1996. She then performed the Post doc at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute – Boston. From 1997 to 2001 she worked as researcher at the Italian National Research in Milan and from 2001 to 2006 she worked as researcher at the University of Milano-Bicocca. In 2006 she obtained a position as Associate Professor and in 2016 as Full Professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca. She has pioneered systems biology approaches to study complex dynamic processes, such as host-pathogen interactions, the process of dendritic cell maturation and the role of dendritic cells in activating and controlling NK cell functions. More recently she focused her research activity on signalling events downstream of CD14/TLR4 within cells of the mammalian innate immune system and she identified some of the key functions played by the NFATc family of transcription factors activated in dendritic cells in response to PRR agonists.
My research work contributed to the recent advances of the emerging research field of nanomedicine. In 2020 I have been appointed to lead nanoformulation and nanocosmetic platform within the interdepartmental infrastructure “Nanotechnology for precision medicine and personalized beauty and Healthcare” NanoCosPha. In 2019, I was awarded with the first prize of the “Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Premio Giovani Talenti dell'Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca”.
1) I developed novel nanoconstructs based on nanoparticles functionalized with peptides, monoclonal antibodies or antibody fragments, as innovative tools for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer and inflammatory diseases. Moreover, in the last few years my research interest has been focused on the investigation of new nanoparticles administration routes alternative to the intravenous one, in particular oral, topical and intranasal delivery (Morelli et al. Pharmaceutics, 2019; Musazzi et al.J. Nanobiotechnol.;2017; Salvioni et al.Pharmacol. Res.,2016).
2) I contributed to the invention related to a Patent (WO2014013473-A1) describing the development of a multifunctional nanoconstruct useful for therapeutic purposes with potential in the preclinical and clinical treatment of cancer, inflammatory diseases, and neurodegenerative disorders.
3) Several high-impact publications reporting on the development of new methodologies for the synthesis, loading and bioconjugation of nanoparticles as drug delivery systems. I developed a new platform for tailoring the surface of nanoparticles. (Colombo et al. Nat. Commun.;2016).
4) I am author of 108 publications: 14 as first author and 24 as corresponding author with an IF of 34;(Scopus).
5) I have been the Principal Investigator of a My First AIRC Grant 2014 and AIRC Investigator Grant in 2022. These grant allowed me to establish and consolidate a new independent laboratory to conduct my research in nanomedical field and to develop a new targeted nanobased-tool.
Nuno C. Santos was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1972. He graduated in Biochemistry from the Faculty of Science, University of Lisbon, in 1995, and received his PhD in Theoretical and Experimental Biochemistry in 1999 from the same University, although all the experimental work was conducted at Instituto Superior Técnico (Technical University of Lisbon) and University of California (Santa Barbara). Currently, he is Associate Professor with Habilitation of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Lisbon, and Head of the Biomembranes & Nanomedicine Unit at the Institute of Molecular Medicine (iMM). Among other distinctions, his research work was awarded with the Gulbenkian Prize for young researchers (2001), Dr. José Luis Champalimaud Prize – Basic Research (2004), Dr. José Luis Champalimaud Prize – Applied Research and Technology (2005) and the ULisboa – Caixa Geral de Depósitos Prize (2017). He is (co)author of 170 articles in per-reviewed international journals, which received more than 8300 citations (h-index 49 and i10-index 131, publishing since 1996), presenting a Journal Citation Reports impact factor sum of 876.1 (average 5.2 per article). In addition to these publications, he (co)authored 10 articles in Portuguese scientific journals, 15 book chapters (mostly published outside Portugal, in English), 3 books (editor, published by Wiley, Springer and MDPI) and 2 international patents. Among different National and International research projects, he was the coordinator of a consortium funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union (FP7), including 10 different research groups from Europe and Brazil. He is member of the Executive Committee of the European Biophysical Societies’ Association (EBSA) since 2019, and the Director of the M2B-PhD Doctoral Program in Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics (involving 5 different institutions) since 2016. He was President of the Portuguese Biophysical Society from 2015 to 2021. He has supervised 11 completed PhDs, 8 as main supervisor and 3 as co-supervisor.
Ernst Wagner is professor of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at LMU and Munich Center of Nanoscience. Previously (1991-2001) he was Director Cancer Vaccines & Gene Therapy, Boehringer Ingelheim (first-in-world polymer-based human gene therapy trial in 1994), 1988 Junior Scientist/group leader at IMP Vienna and Medical Biochemistry Vienna Biocenter; 1985 -1987 postdoc at ETH Zurich, working on origin-of-life chemistry of sugar phosphates. He obtained a Ph.D. in chemistry, TU Vienna in 1985, is Academician of European Academy of Sciences, member of CRS College of Fellows, board member of German Society for Gene Therapy and Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Gene Medicine. He has authored 476 publications with > 44 444 citations on GS, h-index 105 (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-5wWbVAAAAAJ&hl=en)
Dr. Emmanuel Stratakis is a Research Director at the Institute of Electronic structure and laser (IESL) (www.iesl.forth.gr ) of the Foundation for Research and Technology—Hellas (FORTH) (www.forth.gr ). He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Crete in 2001 from the Physics Department, University of Crete. After graduating, he joined as a visiting Researcher the IESL-FORTH working on the ultrafast laser engineering of materials and as an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Materials Science and Technology, University of Crete. In the fall semesters of 2006 and 2008, he was appointed as a visiting Researcher at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of California, Berkeley. In 2007 he was elected Researcher at IESL-FORTH where he is leading the “Ultrafast Laser Micro- and Nano- processing” laboratory (http://stratakislab.iesl.forth.gr / https://www.iesl.forth.gr/en/research/ULNMP-Group). His research interests are in the fields of o (a) Laser-matter interaction; (b) Ultrashort pulsed laser processing of biomimetic surfaces ; (c) Laser processes for organic & hybrid electronics; (d) Laser engineeering and diagnostics of Graphene and related 2D materials ; (e) Advanced photonic processes in photovoltaic and energy storage devices; (f) Photo-assisted synthesis of nanocrystals; (g) Applications on non linear imaging in materials science and biology; (h) Laser assisted biofabrication for tissue engineering applications ; (i) Multipurpose 3D printing complemented with subtractive manufacturing. He has over 220 SCI publications and more than 8000 citations, h-index=48 (Scopus), and he has coordinated many National and EU grants. He has delivered more than 40 invited and keynote lectures and has been organizer and chair in major international scientific conferences. He has been an Editor of the journals ‘Optoelectronic Advances’, ‘Materials Today (Bio)’, ‘Applied Sciences’ and ‘International Journal of molecular Sciences. Since 2015, he is the Director of the Nanoscience Facility of FORTH, part of the NFFA-Europe EU Infrastructure, where he is a member of the General Assembly. He is a National expert in the High-Level Group of EU on Nanotechnologies, Advanced materials, Biotechnology, Advanced Manufacturing and Processing. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of COST. Since January 2020 he is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Biomimetic (https://www.biomimetic.gr/).
Mauro Comes Franchini received his degree in Industrial Chemistry at the University of Bologna in 1993 and PhD in Chemical Science, University of Bologna in 1996. L later he becomes from 1998 as a researcher at the Faculty of Industrial Chemistry, Bologna and then Associate Professor in the 2014. His International Experience is four months University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Dyson Perrins Laboratory and six months Oxford University, UK. He is the author of 125 articles published in international journals. Nineteen WTO patents and 4 contributions to book's chapter and referee for several journals. He is the Member of the honorary editorial board of International Journal of Nanomedicine and Associate Editor for RSC Advances (Royal Chemical Society). Interest in nanomedicine and 3D-printing.
Gerard Tobías-Rossell is Investigador Científico of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC, Spain) at the Materials Science Institute of Barcelona (ICMAB). At ICMAB he leads research on “Nanoengineering of Carbon and Inorganic Materials (NanoCIM)” since 2009; https://ssc.icmab.es/nanocim/. He holds a degree in Chemistry (2000) and PhD in Materials Science (2004). He has performed research stays at Ames Laboratory (USA) and EMAT (Belgium), and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford (2004-2009). Dr. Tobias has been involved in several research projects both at national and international level with research centres and industries. He was for instance the coordinator of the ITN project RADDEL and is currently the PI of ECIME (AEI), ERC Consolidator Grant (NEST) and ERC Proof-of-Concept (TARLIT).