Lorenzo Albertazzi

I use big microscopes to look at small objects.

Lorenzo Albertazzi is an associate professor at the TU/e department of Biomedical Engineering (research group Molecular Biosensing for Medical Diagnostics). He is also junior group leader at the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) in Barcelona, where he leads the 'Nanoscopy for Nanomedicine' group. For most of his career he has been jumping between Chemistry and Biophysics; in his research he now aims to combine both to achieve a molecular understanding of synthetic materials in the biological environment, using optical microscopy and nanoscopy.

With his 2017 ERC Starting Grant, Lorenzo aims at the 'Design of Nanomaterials for Targeted Therapies Guided by Super Resolution Imaging'. In the NANOSTORM project he plans to use super resolution microscopy to examine nanomaterials that have potential as cancer therapies, and understand their interactions with their target: the diseased cells. Doing so will help identify the key principles that are needed to rationally design the next generation of targeted, super-efficient cancer treatments

Lorenzo Albertazzi obtained a MSc in Chemistry (2007) and a PhD in Biophysics (2011) from Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa, Italy). He then joined Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e, The Netherlands) as postdoctoral researcher. In 2013, he was awarded a fellowship of the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS) at TU/e, and in 2014 he became a NWO/VENI fellow (2014). In 2015, he moved to Barcelona (Spain) to the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) to start the 'Nanoscopy for Nanomedicine' group that he currently leads. In 2017, he received an ERC starting grant and in 2018 he was appointed Associate Professor at the TU/e department of Biomedical Engineering, with the research group Molecular Biosensing.