Filippo Piccinini

Background

About Filippo Piccinini

Filippo Piccinini was born on the 20th of April, 1985. He is an Italian engineer whose daily work involves developing software tools for analysing microscopy images to contribute to the fight against cancer. Throughout his university studies, he showed a great capacity to carry out tasks quickly and effectively. He completed the bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Biomedical Engineering on schedule, obtaining the maximum mark in both (i.e, 110 cum Laude). He also won the "Mario Pasquini Best Master Thesis Award” (2010 edition) and was awarded a ministerial grant to immediately start a PhD in Information Technologies at the University of Bologna (UniBO) and ETH Zurich Switzerland. After the PhD, he worked for 5 years as a researcher at UniBO, acting as a tutor for several Computer Science courses. He started to create a strong network of international collaborators working together to develop new Machine Learning approaches for 2D High-Content Screening (HCS) of anti-cancer drugs. During this time, he also spent several periods working abroad and having most of his ideas supported by grants from several international institutions (EMBO, FEBS, EACR, NEUBIAS, UICC, MAECI). Then, wanting to be nearer to centres where data are generated, he decided to move to IRCCS “Istituto Romagnolo per lo Studio dei Tumori Dino Amadori (IRST)", an Italian cancer institute whose researchers have long-standing experience in anti-cancer in vitro models for drug testing and whose laboratories are equipped with top-notch 3D bioreactors for multicellular spheroids. In other words, a perfect place for extending the experience he had gained in 2D HCS of anti-cancer drugs to 3D models. In this new environment, he established the “Microscopy and Artificial Intelligence (MiAI)” unit, with the aim of providing daily computer support to Life Scientists in their research endeavours. Then, in 2021 he became an assistant professor and in 2024 an associate professor at UniBO. His career progression has steadily evolved from tutoring undergraduate students to co-supervising PhDs, earning him the Italian National Scientific Qualification in “FIS/07 - Applied Physics” and “09/G2 – Bioengineering”. To date, he is teaching in several Statistics, Physics and Computer Vision courses at UniBO. In addition, he has several conference publications and articles published in top-notch scientific journals, including Nature Methods, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Nature Communications.