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PhD Student

Marina obtained a BSc in Medical and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and a MSc in Industrial and Environmental Biotechnology at the University of Bari (Bari, Italy). During her BSc, she carried out a thesis internship in Prof. Gianluca Farinola's group where she worked on in vivo functionalization of diatoms. For her master's thesis internship, she worked in Prof. Omenetto’s lab at Tufts University (Boston, MA, USA) on silk fibroin-based adhesive fibres.

As a biotechnologist, she does have a very interdisciplinary background. For this reason, she finds herself particularly at ease when she is at the intersection between biology and material science.

Marina is currently a first-year PhD student in the Bio-inspired Photonics group supervised by Prof. Silvia Vignolini, at the University of Cambridge, where she is focusing on the development of a dynamic living photonic pigment that exploits the structural colouration of the marine bacterium Flavobacterium IR1.

Publications

Dynamic Adhesive Fibers for Remote Capturing of Objects
ML Presti, M Portoghese, GM Farinola, FG Omenetto
– Advanced Functional Materials
(2024)
The role of tyrosine in protein-dopamine based bioinspired adhesives: the stoichiometry that maximizes bonding strength
M Lo Presti, N Ostrovsky-Snider, G Rizzo, M Portoghese, D Blasi, GM Farinola, FG Omenetto
– Frontiers in Biomaterials Science
(2023)
2,
1184088

Postgraduate student

Telephone number

01223 334319 (shared)

Email address