April 2022
Giorgio Volpe
Principal Investigator
I am Professor of Soft Matter at the Department of Chemistry, University College London (UCL). You can find my detailed citation metrics at Publons, Google Scholar or ResearchGate. Before joining UCL as a Lecturer in Physical Chemistry in 2014, I was a CNRS postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel and at the Institut Langevin (Paris, France), where I performed research on nanophotonics of scattering media and wavefront shaping. My advisor was Prof Sylvain Gigan. In May 2012, I obtained my PhD at ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences (Barcelona, Spain). My advisor was Prof Romain Quidant. During my PhD, my research was focused primarily on optimizing light-matter interaction with very small quantities of matter down to the single molecule level. In particular, I explored novel ways of controlling the optical response of nanoantennas either through novel designs or in a dynamical and deterministic way by spatially shaping the illumination. Before enrolling in the PhD program, I received my Master’s degree in Bioengineering from the University of Padua (Italy) in October 2007.
Alessia Gentili
Postdoctoral Researcher
I’m a postdoctoral research fellow working on the development and application of a platform for single molecule tracking with fluorescence lifetime imaging, as part of a collaborative research project between the groups of Dr Sabrina Simoncelli, Prof. Giorgio Volpe, and Dr Sergi Padilla-Parra. I completed my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Giorgio Volpe, where I focused on the characterisation and experimental generation of single anomalous diffusion trajectories. Throughout this period, I gained expertise in the contactless magnetic manipulation of driven colloidal particles, single-particle data analysis, and machine learning techniques. Before my PhD, I received a Master’s degree in Physics from the Sapienza University in Rome, Italy.
Robert Malinowski
Postdoctoral Researcher
I am a Research Fellow in the Volpe group investigating the deposition of materials from controllable, motile droplets. I am currently building on my PhD work where I developed a method of manipulating these droplets using only a small source of vapour, allowing intricate control over their behaviours and the materials within them. We hope to use this phenomenon to extract enhanced functionalities from different materials using this interplay between chemistry and physics rather than additives or chemical modification. I have had several industrial roles in between my academic positions, including the synthesis of pharmacological candidates for a BioFocus (now Charles River), the synthesis of polycarbonate catalysts for Econic Technologies and the heterogenous functionalisation of cellulose nanofibers for affinity chromatography for Cytiva.
Ann-Céline Clabout
PhD Student
I have received my MSc in Drug Development from KU Leuven. During my Master’s, I discovered my interest in synthetic biology. Under the supervision of Professor Vitor Pinheiro, I developed novel synthetic terminators to expand the genetic toolbox available to synthetic biologists. As part of the CDT in Antimicrobial Resistance, my PhD project focuses on engineering synthetic cells as novel antibacterial agents. When I am not in the lab, you’ll likely find me exploring London’s parks.
Jaume Cos Cavada
PhD Student
I am Jaume, a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Giorgio Volpe. I am working on the manipulation of droplets (using the CoManD technology developed in the SAM Group) for organic semiconductor deposition at UCL. The aim behind controlled, ordered deposition of organic semiconductors is to produce materials with desirable properties for use in organic electronics and organic photovoltaics. I graduated from Imperial College London with an MSci in Chemistry in 2021. I also obtained an MSc in Materials for Energy and the Environment from UCL in 2022, my Masters project involved the synthesis of a semiconducting polymer for use in organic photovoltaics. My main research interests are renewable energy and sustainable materials.
Lorenzo Gilly
PhD Student
I am currently working towards a PhD at UCL under the supervision of Prof. Giorgio Volpe. This project is in collaboration with Dr Joyjit Chattoraj at IHPC (A*STAR) and Dr Ran Ni at NTU in Singapore. The project focuses on adapting models of non-equilibrium dynamic systems that utilise normalising flows to diffusion models capable of handling greater numbers of particles. In my first year I will be simulating multi-particle systems via the implementation of diffusion models in combination with MCMC methods. My second and third years will be spent at the A*STAR Institute of High-Performance Computing in Singapore. Before joining this group, I completed both my undergraduate and master’s degrees at UCL in Statistics and Machine Learning (DSML) respectively. For my master’s thesis, I extended a novel training method for feed-forward neural networks, involving auxiliary variables and Bregman losses, to recurrent neural networks effectively overcoming the vanishing gradient problem.
Maisie Milton
PhD Student
I am a PhD student studying at UCL’s department of Civil, Environmental and Engineering, under the supervision of Dr Lena Ciric and Prof. Giorgio Volpe. My project investigates how a bacterium’s local microscopic environment influences its ability to horizontally transfer antibiotic resistance genes. Specifically, the effect of surface topography on the spread of carbapenem resistance encoding plasmids between Enterobacteriaceae. Ultimately this work aims to facilitate the engineering of surfaces that inhibit the spread of antimicrobial resistance genes in both clinical and environmental settings. Prior to joining UCL, I graduated from the University of Birmingham with an MSc in Microbiology and Infection. My MSc project used molecular genetic techniques to edit a ‘curing’ plasmid (pCURE), which is designed to spread through a microbial population and displace multidrug resistance plasmids, restoring the populations antibiotic susceptibility.
Maks Pecnik Bambic
PhD Student
I am currently studying for a PhD at UCL’s department of Chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Giorgio Volpe (UCL) and Dr Qing Xiang Pei (A*STAR, Singapore), in collaboration with Dr Ran Ni (NTU, Singapore). My project focuses on the investigation of the in silico development of new self-folding materials for targeted deliver with the help of deep learning and Bayesian methods. The project will be carried out at UCL in my first year and continued in Singapore where I will spend two years, before returning back to UCL to finish my project. Before starting my PhD, I had completed my MChem in Chemistry with Computational Chemistry at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. My masters project focused on improving the quality of information extracted from a Velocity Map Imaging experiment, using a deep learning model as opposed to traditional algorithmical methods.
Miruna Tanase
PhD Student
I am currently a PhD student under the joint supervision of Dr Sabrina Simoncelli and Prof Giorgio Volpe, under a synergy programme between LCN and the UCL Chemistry department. My research will focus on investigating how anomalous protein diffusion in the plasma membrane during T cell activation can facilitate cellular signalling events. This will be done via a combination of experimental work with super-resolved fluorescence microscopy and a deep-learning powered analysis of molecular trajectories. This study will allow us to understand the mechanisms that control the self-organisation of signalling proteins within the T cell immunological synapse, which has not yet been fully unravelled. Prior to staring my PhD, I had completed an MSci degree in Chemistry with Mathematics at UCL. My 4th year master project focused on optimised search strategies for active particles in complex environments, where I developed a computational model for 3D searches on Non-Euclidean Surfaces (NES).
Soft Active Matter Lab 