University of Naples Federico II, Italy
Assistant Professor
Thomas completed his B.Sc. in Bioengineering at Clemson University (Clemson, SC, USA) with a focus on biomaterials, and then continued in the Bioengineering Department at Clemson in the Nanomedicine Lab of Prof. Frank Alexis. His thesis was focused on developing hybrid inorganic-polymeric nanoparticles for theranostic drug delivery to treat cancer. After completing his Ph.D., he joined the BioNanomaterials group of Profs. Alke Fink and Barbara Rothen-Rutishauser at the Adolphe Merkle Institute (Fribourg, Swtizerland) as a postdoctoral researcher in 2014. There he studied the fundamental interacations between nanoparticles and biological systems (i.e. colloidal stability in complex media, particle-protein interactions, and particle-cell interactions under hydrodynamic conditions). In 2018 he was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie MINDED fellowship to study the application of nanomedicines to improve drug delivery across the blood—brain barrier for the treatment of neurodevelopmental diseases, and joined the Laboratory of Nanotechnology for Precision Medicine group of Prof. Paolo Decuzzi at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Genoa, Italy). In December 2023 he joined the Department of Pharmacy at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II (Naples, Italy) as an assistant professor (ricercatore di tempo determinato – tipo B). His research interests lie at the intersection of nanomaterials and biological systems, developing nanomedicines to solve problems in drug delivery and bioengineering, and optimizing nanomedicines through automated high-throughput screening and machine learning.
