Dr. Carmela De Marco

Biography

Born and raised in Salento, the easternmost and remote corner of Italy, she moved to Milan to study Biomedical Engineering at Polytechnic of Milan where she graduated with honors in July 2005. After which, she enrolled in a doctorate course at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Lecce. There she discovered the fascinating world of soft-lithography and microfluidics. The culmination of her doctoral research lead to a paper in Advanced Materials on the use of solvent-resistant nano-fluidics as a straightforward and low-cost method for producing light-emitting organic nanofibers. Moreover, during her doctoral experience abroad, she had the opportunity to work in close collaboration with a bacteriology laboratory for the design of a microfluidic platform for trapping bacteria. She earned her PhD in Nanosciences in July 2009. As  postdoc at the Polytechnic of Milan, she studied the interaction of femtosecond laser pulses with polymers, finding that laser ablation causes a permanent change to the wettability of polymers, useful for the realization of microfluidic passive valves and mixers. Moreover, she investigated a process for selectively patterning hyaluronic acid onto antifouling perfluoropolyether surfaces aimed at capture single cancer cells. In June 2016 Carmela joined the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich after winning the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship with the project “microMAGNETOFLUIDICS: 3D-printed magnetic microfluidics for applications in life sciences”. The aim of this project is to develop a microfluidic device that has 3D-printed magnetic microvalves that can be operated easily and wirelessly to create compartments for single cells, promoting the use of microfluidics among biologists and bacteriologists for decrypting cellular mechanisms at the single cell level.

Research Interest

ROBOTS