About
Marco is a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry and UKRI Research Fellow with a research focus in Nanomedicine and Medical Imaging. Marco graduated with an MChem degree from The University of Leicester in 2002 and after a period of working at the University of Siena, Italy, he returned to Leicester to complete a PhD in biological inorganic chemistry (2007) developing biologically responsive MRI contrast agents and luminescence lanthanide probes for molecular imaging. He completed two postdoctoral positions: University of Liège, Belgium, studying polymer bound/ biologically responsive lanthanide complexes; Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique (CEA) Grenoble, France, developing lanthanide quantum dot probes. In 2010 he joined the group at The University of Liverpool (UoL) working with Prof. Steve Rannard and Prof. Andrew Owen on Non-Attrition HAART nanoparticle therapies for HIV/AIDS Drug Delivery. During this time, Marco developed many of the technologies that underpinned the formation of the UoL owned spin-out company Tandem Nano Ltd, for which he is a co-founder. This included the cGMP clinical manufacture of HIV candidate therapies for the world’s first human trial studies of orally-dosed HIV nanomedicines. In 2019 Marco took on a Lectureship position in the Department of Material Science and Engineering at The University of Sheffield before returning to Liverpool in July 2020 having successfully been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to develop novel nanomedicine technologies. Marco also won an EPSRC Strategic Equipment Award to purchase the Momentum Magnetic Particle Imaging scanner from Magnetic Insight; the first MPI scanner in the UK, installed in 2023. Marco has several research interests across materials science and nanomedicine, including Inorganic/Organic Nanocomposite Particle (I/O-NP) and Solid Drug Nanoparticle (SDN) development for both diagnostic and therapeutic healthcare applications.