Marco Calvigioni

Dr. Marco Calvigioni is a first-year PhD student in Clinical and Translational Sciences (curriculum Immunology and Microbiology) at the University of Pisa. He graduated in Biological Sciences in 2017 and Biology Applied to Biomedicine in 2019 at the University of Pisa and is currently attending the fourth year of the residency program in Clinical Microbiology and Virology at the same University. His research field mainly focuses on the human microbiota, including the well-studied gut microbiota and other microbial communities residing in the human body. He is a passionate microbiologist interested in unraveling the tangle of numberless interactions that occur between the human host and microbes inhabiting it. He is currently developing a novel in vitro model based on electrospun gelatin structures to culture the gut microbiota ex vivo to be used for clinical research. His PhD project aims at improving the model and exploiting it as a tool to evaluate the effects of specific exogenous factors, such as enteropathogens, probiotics, drugs, and dietary compounds on the in vitro-cultured microbiota and vice versa.