Francesco Pasqualini

Background

About Francesco Pasqualini

TL; DR. I am an Italian researcher who worked at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and the Wyss Center at the University/ETH Zurich. In 2019, I won an ERC starting grant and I am opening my laboratory at the University of Pavia, in Northern Italy. Check out the website and get in touch if interested. I am an inventor in several patents and patent applications, as well as a co-/author of research papers published, among others, in prestigious journals of the Science, Nature, and Cell families. I obtained my Master in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Bologna (Italy - 2008) with a thesis in Synthetic Biology that won a gold medal at the MIT-hosted iGEM competition (USA - 2007). Later, I completed my Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences at the Universita’ Politecnica Delle Marche (Italy, 2012) working in collaboration with the University of California Davis (USA) and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (USA). I continued as a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Medical School and finally as a team leader at the the Wyss Translational Center Zurich (CH - 2016) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically-Inspired Engineering at Harvard University (USA – 2019). In my work, I focused on: i) biophysically-descriptive computational models of human cardiac cells; ii) tissue-engineered cell culture platforms (organs-on-chips) for drug testing and disease modeling; and quality assurance platforms for stem cell biology and regenerative medicine applications. I serve as a reviewer for international scientific journals and funding agencies as well as an external expert adviser for consulting firms in the Life Science space. Moreover, I have been a founding member of the Standards Coordinating Body for Cell/Gene and Regenerative Medicines, a foundation that promotes public/private partnerships for the development of internationally harmonized standards in these fields.