Marco Maria D’Andrea
I graduated in Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Technologies at the University of Siena with a thesis regarding the construction of a plasmid for the production of antibodies in Fab format in Escherichia coli. During my work of thesis, also thanks to the passion and patient guidance of my supervisor, Prof. Gian Maria Rossolini, and of Prof. Maria Cristina Thaller, involved in the project, I became more and more keen on Microbiology and microorganisms, which I think are one of the most sophisticated and powerful "Chemistry Labs" that can exist. After my thesis I continued my path of Microbiologist with a Ph.D. in Medical Biotechnology at the University of Siena, mainly developing DNA chips for genotyping of antibiotic resistance determinants in bacteria. I had the opportunity to study the mechanisms that lead to this phenomenon in bacterial isolates of clinical origin in depth, to evaluate their diffusion in the hospital environment and, at the same time, to participate in several national and international research projects. Finally, since some years I have undertaken a new and stimulating collaboration with the "ecomicro" group, with the aim of isolate and characterize bacteriophages able to selectively kill some of the multi-resistant bacterial clones circulating in hospital environments.
Since my Ph.D. period I have had teaching duties for Microbiology and Bioinformatics courses and I am currently a Contract Professor at the University of Siena (module of Bioinformatic in Clinical Microbiology, Integrated Course of Clinical Microbiology, Master's Degree in Medical Biotechnologies) and at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" (course of Genomics and Bioinformatic of Microorganisms, Master's Degree in Bioinfomatic).
I have always been enthusiast about computer science, a discipline that I have widely exploited in several areas of my work and of my research, and that today I exploit in particular for microbiology studies using Next Generation Sequencing approaches.