I'm a bioengineer with a keen interest in the soft matter and biological physics. I lead a research group whose activities sit between applied and fundamental research and merge physical and life science intimately. Our long-term goal is to design novel strategies for the engineering of bionic units capable of navigating the human body and deliver either therapeutic agents or diagnostic probes precisely.  We apply a constructionist approach where we mimic biological complexity in the form of design principles to produce functional units from simple building blocks and their interactions. Such an approach, we christened as Molecular Bionics, allows us to both replicate biological complexity to create model surrogates as well as to engineer novel carriers to deliver of anticancer drugs, antibiotics, genes, proteins and diagnostic probes. We achieve both objectives developing experimental and theoretical methods to probe biological complexity and the material/cell interface. We are very active in novel experimental techniques such as molecular engineering, liquid phase electron microscopy and ultrafast imaging as well as very keen to apply both computational modelling and theoretical statistical physics to support our experiments. 

Ai is a medical doctor and an epidemiologist. Her main research interest concerns health determinants and how they vary by geography or country income level. In particular, mental disorders and their comorbidity with physical disorders are her primary interest. She conducts multi-country epidemiological studies examining the modifiable risk factors for a wide range of mental and physical disorders with high burden at the population level. The goal of her research is to understand why health gaps exist and to provide vital information for the establishment of effective interventions for people to live a long life in full health, and also on how health systems can be improved and disparities be eliminated. 

Natasa is a computer scientist working in the area of computational biology and medicine.  Her main research interests lie in designing algorithms for mining systems-level molecular and clinical data, with the ultimate goal to improve biological understanding and therapeutics.  For these purposes, Natasa designs network science and machine learning algorithms that uncover novel molecular mechanisms from large-scale data and give new insight into disease.