Profile

I’m from Italy, but for the past 4 years and an half I’ve been living in London, where I completed my PhD in chemistry and currently work as a teaching assistant. I live in a lovely flat, which I share with two flatmates, in Hackney Wick.
I love watching tv shows and movies. My favourite tv show at the moment is Game of Thrones. I like cartoons too : i never miss an episode of Adventure Time! My favourite movie is Bram’s Stocker Dracula. I spend a lot of time learning about the art of cinema and photography, because I find it really fascinating and I hope to be involved in the production of a movie someday.

I listen to a lot of music, I like to discover new artists and genres everyday and I can play guitar.
I like learning new languages, I speak Italian (of course) and I learnt English mostly on my own, watching tv and reading books (I read a lot of books). My mum is french, so I know French, even though I don’t practice it
that much, and I speak a little bit of Spanish. I also love to travel, as soon as I have some time I always organise trips with my friends.
My current job allows me enough free time to cook a lot and try many different new dishes, I spend a lot of time cooking and baking, I love all food, but my favourite is pizza. Since I like to eat, I go regularly to the gym to stay fit: recently I began fencing and archery courses, to mix up with the boring training I do during the week.

I work at Queen Mary University of London. As a teaching assistant I help undergraduate students during their chemistry laboratory practicals. I teach them how to make their reactions work, how to use glassware and instruments and I make sure they don’t blow the laboratory up! And when I’m not in the laboratory, I mark the scrips of my students.

My PhD research activity involved the development of devices for measuring the sugar level in the blood of diabetic people. I spent many hours working in the laboratory, had a lot of meetings with my supervisor and attended seminaries and courses.

Working as a researcher involves also presenting your results through publications and conferences, which means spending a lot of time reading and writing, but you get to travel around the world and meet a lot of people too!

The days with the students are both funny and really tiring. I get to the teaching lab and make sure that all the students are present and that they have everything they need to do their experiments. I walk around the lab asking them questions on their work, but mostly answering their questions and trying to help them when they mess up.

When I work from home, I take care of marking scripts and exercises. At the moment I’m writing a couple of publications about my research, so a lot of time goes into that.

Some days I tutor A-levels and GCSE students in chemistry, physics and maths, so I get to improve my teaching skills even more.

Finally I’m looking for a job as a postdoctoral researcher and trying to get money to spend on my research, which involves a great deal of reading and application writing.