I am a microbial ecologist working as a postdoctoral researcher in Gabriele Micali’s Microbial Ecology Lab at IRCCS Humanitas Research Hospital in Milan. I study how bacteria grow and interact — how cross-feeding, cooperation and cheating shape the composition of small communities, and how those interactions change the way populations respond to antibiotics.
My work sits between the bench and the terminal: I run growth experiments in plate readers, microfluidic chambers and continuous-culture bioreactors, and I write the analysis pipelines that turn those time-series into growth rates, lineages and dose–response curves. Most of that code is open — see Software.
I did my doctoral research in microbial ecology at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), where I tested ecological theory with synthetic bacterial communities and models of public-goods “cheating”. Before that I trained in ecology and evolution at Imperial College London and in biology at the University of Hull.
Interests
- Microbial interactions: cross-feeding, public goods, cooperation and cheating
- Bacterial growth dynamics and antibiotic tolerance
- Quantitative methods for growth-curve, timelapse and bioreactor data
- Open, reproducible analysis tooling in R and Python