Current members

Claudia Contini – Group Leader

Claudia is an Assistant Professor in Biotechnology and Engineering Biology in the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London.

She holds a Master degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of Padua, Italy and a PhD in Physical Chemistry from University College London, UK. Following her PhD, Claudia she continued her academic career at Imperial College London, as a postdoctoral researcher, where she was subsequently awarded competitive fellowships, including the ISSF Fellowship and the BBSRC Discovery Fellowship. Her work has been recognised with several prestigious awards, including the L’Oréal–UNESCO UK Fellowship, the BBSRC Discovery Fellowship, and the Italy Made Me award from the Italian Embassy in London.

Outside academia, she is co-Director of the Association of the Italian Scientists in the UK (AISUK), IUPAC National Representative for the Physical and Biophysical Chemistry Division and part of the  Royal Society of Chemistry Colloid & Interface Science Group committee.

Zain Raef – PhD student

Zain joined the group in October 2025 as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow. She completed an MSc Degree in Nanotechnology and Regenerative Medicine at University College London, UK. Zain’s PhD project will focus on engineering dynamic polymeric synthetic cells to advance the understanding of membrane–condensate interactions and their potential applications in therapeutic interventions as a part of the ComeInCell Doctoral Network on Integrative Synthetic Cell Design.

Percy Scott – PhD student

Percy joined the group in October 2025. He completed an MSci Degree in Medicinal Chemistry at Imperial College London, UK. Percy’s PhD project will focus on Engineering Dynamic Polymeric Synthetic Cells.

Yeyang Sun – PhD student

Yeyang joined the group in January 2023 after completing an MSc Degree in Advanced Materials Science at the University College London, UK. Yeyang’s PhD project focuses on engineering dynamic polymeric synthetic cells, co-supervised with Prof. Theoni Georgiou, Prof. Oscar Ces and Prof. John Seddon.

Julia Purrinos De Oliveira – Research Assistant

Julia is a Research Assistant working on the Schmidt Sciences DevCell Project to build a scalable Synthetic Cell Platform. She did her Systems and Synthetic Biology MRes working on 3D-Printed Multi-Responsive Artificial Tissue Models.

Luyao Chen – MRes student

Luyao is a Biomedical MRes student working on Designing Artificial Cells for Biomedical Protein Synthesis.

Kamilya X. V. Reid – MRes student

Kamilya is a Nanomedicine and Nanodiagnostics MRes student working on swimming hydrogel-based microrobots for targeted cargo delivery and co-supervised with Belal Ahmad.

Finn Laslett – MRes student

Finn is an MRes student in Systems and Synthetic Biology. He is working on developing biohybrid plant cells, co-supervised by Giovanni Sena. 

Alumni

  • Juan Ivars Miñana, PhD (2025), co-supervised with Yuval Elani.
  • William Chen, Remy Benoit Smith, Final Year Research Project students (2025).
  • Elisa Roberti, visiting PhD student (2024) from the Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Italy) in the Stefano Palagi Lab.
  • Amanda Ringwood, SSB MRes project student (2024) co-supervised with Jose Jimenez Zarco.
  • David Tsang, SSB MRes project student (2024) co-supervised with Ravinash Krishna Kumar.
  • Xinyu (Carina) Zhuang, SSB MRes project student (2024) co-supervised with Tom Macdonald.
  • Beining (Sandra) Yang, Nanomaterials MRes project student (2024) co-supervised with James Hindley.
  • Shuwan Jiang, Nanomaterials MRes project student (2024) co-supervised with Prof. Oscar Ces.
  • Andres Hernandez, Cora Huang, Jamie Shin, Final Year Research Project students (2024).
  • Hanwen Xu, IMSE MRes project student (2023) co-supervised with Prof. Theoni Georgiou and CCBio.
  • Nina O’Toole, SSB MRes project student (2022) co-supervised with Yuval Elani.
  • Senitha Mindula Wanigasinghe, MSci project student (2020) co-supervised with Prof. Oscar Ces.
  • Wenyi Hu, Nanomaterials MRes project student (2020) co-supervised with Yuval Elani.
  • Shazeen Amir, Chemistry BSc project student (2020) co-supervised with Prof. Oscar Ces.