Biography

Marco is from a small town in the middle of the Italian Tuscan countryside named Santo Pietro Belvedere. He received his master’s degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2008 with a project targeting cancer metabolism, supervised by Prof. Filippo Minutolo. He then spent a year at DSM in the Netherlands before moving into his Ph.D. at the University of Bath, UK. Here, under the supervision of Prof. Barry Potter and Dr. Mathew Leese, Marco undertook his doctoral work involving synthesis and biological evaluation of small molecules for the treatment of breast cancer. Marco worked also as a community pharmacist, and after obtaining his Ph.D. in 2014, he relocated to Oxford, MS to start his Postdoctoral Research Associate position at the University of Mississippi in 2015, and then continued at the University of Florida in 2017 under the supervision of Dr. Christopher McCurdy. Within Dr. McCurdy’s group, Marco worked on projects ranging from small molecule synthesis to natural product isolation and characterization, to ADMET properties optimization at the preclinical stage for the treatment of pain and opioid use disorder. In 2022, Marco joined the research group to work on drug development for neglected tropical diseases.