Istituto Italiano
di Tecnologia (IIT)

Dr Francesco De Angelis is Principal Investigator at IIT where he leads the Plasmon Nanotechnologies Unit (20 members in total: 2 researchers, 15 postdocs, 2 PhD students and 1 technician). His main expertise relies on micro and nano-optical devices for biomedical applications. He was awarded an IDEAS-ERC Consolidator grant (Neuro-Plasmonics, grant agreement 616213) for developing radically new interfaces between electrical/optical devices and neuronal networks. Before ProID, He has been also the coordinator of the PROSEQO project (FET Open, grant agreement 687089) that was devoted to next-generation methods for protein sequencing. He published more than 160 papers in peer-review impacted journals.

Dr. Giuseppina Iachetta has a Ph.D. in Advanced Biology from the University of Naples Federico II. Presently, she works as post-doc in the Plasmon Nanotechnologies lab, working on new technologies for pre-clinical cardiotoxicity screenings. She has expertise on primary, secondary and 3D cultures, fluorescence light sheet microscopy and confocal microscopy, qPCR, western blotting and ELISA assays, spectrofluorimetric assays, cell viability and proliferation assays, histological techniques for morphological tissue analysis. She worked on drug delivery for testing in brain the efficacy of nanocarriers to deliver therapeutic molecules across the blood-brain barrier in vivo and in vitro.

Natalia Masiera graduated in Chemistry from Technical University of Lodz in 2012. In 2019, she obtained her PhD in the Institute of Physical Chemistry of Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw with the dissertation: “Porphycens in photodynamic of cancer cells and photodynamic inactivation of bacteria”. In the years 2016 – 2018, she led the project: “Mechanism of death induced in cancer cells by photodynamic therapy by means of porphycene photosensitizers”, funded by PRELUDIUM grant of Polish National Science Centre. Currently she is a postdoctoral researcher in the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa. She works in the group of Plasmon Nanotechnologies over the topic of Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy of neuronal cells. In her research, she is trying to keep the interdisciplinary approach, bridging between chemistry, biology and physics.

Silvia Conti received her M.Sc. in Industrial Chemistry from the University of Bologna in 2013, and her PhD in Bioengineering and Robotics with a thesis on "Fully printed Organic Thin Film Transistors for Biosensing Applications" from the University of Genova under the supervision of Professor Annalisa Bonfiglio (2017). She then worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Institute of Microelectronics of Barcelona (IMB-CNM) in the Integrated Circuit & System (ICAS) group (2017-2018) and at Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione of the University of Pisa in the framework of ERC PEP2D and H2020 WASP projects (2019-2021). In November 2021, she joined the Plasmon Nanotechnologies group at Istituto Italiano di Tencologia in the group of Francesco de Angelis. The main focus of her research activity is related to the development, fabrication, and optimization of an opto-electronic system based on organic materials on flexible substrates for electrophysiological screening and mapping of cellular activity.

Rosalia Moreddu is a Postdoctoral researcher at IIT, working on the development of nano-devices for non-invasive cellular electrophysiology. She previously worked at CERN on particle detection technologies based on microfluidics. She pursued a PhD degree at Imperial College London in the development of curved ocular sensors. She holds a Master’s degree in Nanotechnology and a Bachelor’s degree in Bioengineering.

Senior researcher at the Plasmon Nanotechnologies unit led by Dr Francesco De Angelis. His main expertise is on nano-phonics and plasmonic with particular attention on exploiting the near field for measuring, mapping and modifying surfaces at the nanoscale. With his activity in IIT, his experience has then shifted more to the application of nanophotonics to the biological field, especially for high-performance sensing and mapping of biosamples. He also is the inventor co-author of three patents and published more than 60 papers on peer-review impacted journals; H index = 14. Dr Tantussi has been involved in many projects, among them: FET-Open PROSEQO (2016-2019); ERC CoG, Neuro-Plasmonics (PI Francesco De Angelis, 2014-2018), E2-Plas, EC FP7: NanoSci-E+ (2009-2012).