Assistant Professor
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee
My scientific career started in Italy at the University of Urbino where I have obtained two bachelors and a master degree in biology and biotechnology. Thereafter, I moved to Switzerland where I have obtained a PhD in plant cellular biology at the University of Neuchâtel in Professor Jean-Marc Neuhaus’s laboratory. A few years later, I had the opportunity to work as a Post-Doc in Professor Martin Parry’s laboratory at Rothamsted Research (UK) in a project focused on the exploitation of the cyanobacterial carbon-concentrating mechanism to improve photosynthesis. At present I am working at the University of Tennessee (USA) as Assistant Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences, where I am involved in several projects of plant synthetic biology and plastid genetic engineering. I am also member of the Center for Agricultural Synthetic Biology (CASB) at UT where I am collaborating with the two codirectors Professor Scott Lenaghan and Neal Stewart.