Francesca Ceroni

Dr Francesca Ceroni is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Her research focuses now on bacterial and mammalian Synthetic Biology towards biomedical applications and bioproduction.

Dr Francesca Ceroni graduated in Pharmaceutical Biotechnologies from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 2007. She then obtained a PhD in Bioengineering from the same university in 2011. Her thesis examined the development of synthetic genetic devices in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells for the control of cell functions. In particular, she was interested in deepening the feasibility of a bottom-up approach in the design of synthetic circuits.

In 2010, she was Visiting Research Fellow in the Laboratory of Prof. Pam Silver, in the Department of Systems Biology at the Harvard Medical School of Boston, USA. She worked together with Dr. Karmella Haynes to build a synthetic device for real-time detection of microRNAs in cancer cells at a single cell level.

In January 2013 Francesca joined Imperial College London as Research Associate in Synthetic Biology in the groups of Dr. Tom Ellis and Dr. Guy-Bart Stan. Her work aimed at examining the causes of physiological burden in Escherichia coli when transformed with foreign genetic devices in order to identify design rules for future synthetic systems.

In 2016 Francesca was awarded the Junior Research Fellowship of Imperial College London to deepen her interests in mammalian cell physiology for synthetic biology applications.

In October 2018 she was appointed Lecturer in the Department of Chemical engineering and since September 2022 she is Senior Lecturer.

Publications

Journals

• Roberto DB, Mara P, Fabiana T, et al., 2022, Resource-aware construct design in mammalian cells
• Monck C, Elani Y, Ceroni F, 2022, Cell-free protein synthesis: biomedical applications and future perspectives, Chemical Engineering Research and Design, Vol:177, ISSN:0263-8762, Pages:653-658
• Grob A, Di Blasi R, Ceroni F, 2021, Experimental tools to reduce the burden of bacterial synthetic biology, Current Opinion in Systems Biology, Vol:28, ISSN:2452-3100
• Di Blasi R, Zouein A, Ellis T, et al., 2021, Genetic toolkits to design and build mammalian synthetic systems, Trends in Biotechnology, Vol:39, ISSN:0167-7799, Pages:1004-1018
• Di Blasi R, Marbiah M, Siciliano V, et al., 2021, A call for caution in analysing mammalian co-transfection experiments and implications of resource competition in data misinterpretation, Nature Communications, Vol:12, ISSN:2041-1723