Francesco Simone Ruggeri
Francesco Simone Ruggeri is currently Assistant Professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Before his appointment Wageningen, he has completed his independent Junior Research Fellowship at the Department of Chemistry at University of Cambridge and at the Darwin College (UK). He holds a PhD in Biophysics obtained in 2015 at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
In his previous research, Dr. Ruggeri has led the development and application of single-molecule scanning probe microscopy and spectroscopic methods for the bio-chemical and bio-physical characterisation of biomolecular processes at the nanoscale. Overall, Dr. Ruggeri´s approach has brought new insights into the formation and structural characterization of misfolding of proteins and their correlation with the onset of neurodegenerative disorders.
Dr. Ruggeri expertise has led already to the publication of more than 60 peer-reviewed scientific articles, out of which more than 10 are in Nature series journals. In these works, Dr. Ruggeri has developed and applied of single molecule AFM-based approaches in combination with microfluidics, to study the chemical and structural properties of biological systems that are challenging to access using conventional bulk biophysical methods. Furthermore, he has first demonstrated the application nanomechanical mapping and infrared nanospectroscopy (AFM-IR) to unravel the properties of biological samples at the nanoscale in air and liquid environments. As major advance in the field of microscopy and spectroscopy, he has recently demonstrated that AFM-IR is capable to acquire the chemical fingerprint and secondary structure of biological samples in native liquid environments and at the single-molecule scale.