How bacteria grow, cooperate and cheat, and how those interactions change the way populations respond to antibiotics.
I am a microbial ecologist and postdoctoral researcher in Gabriele Micali’s Microbial Ecology Lab at IRCCS Humanitas Research Hospital in Milan. I work with small synthetic bacterial communities, asking how cross-feeding, public goods and cheating shape their composition, and what those interactions do to antibiotic tolerance.
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. The code is on the Software page.
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.
Recent
- May 2026 Talk at Microfluidic Horizons 2026, where I also served on the organising committee.
- Dec 2025 Poster at the BES Annual Meeting 2025.
- Jul 2025 Talk and poster at FEMS Micro 2025: Stronger at the seams: antibiotic stress enhances amino acid leakage and cross-feeding.
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