Lines of research

NMR metabolomics

My research activity consist in the development of new techniques and tools for metabolomics under a translational perspective. I'm interested in the development of signal processing algorithms and software packages written in R/C++ for the automatic profiling of several chemical species like lipoproteins, lipids, glycoproteins and low weight chemical compounds in bio fluids, measured by high resolution proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. We pursue the discovery of disease biomarkers in several medical specialities like diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular and cancer. Another emerging research area consist in the fabrication of robust and reliable nanostructured gold covered black silicon surfaces for surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) and laser-desorption-ionization mass spectrometry (LDI-MS), two of the most popular platforms that allow the acquisition of molecular images (molecular histology). For them, we are also automating signal and data analysis workflows that comprise all the needed steps: data visualization, signal processing, statistics and multivariate analysis. As main applications, we study the intratumor heterogeneity in bladder and neck and head cancer in human samples, with the aim of discovering diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers from the tissue.