Bioengineering

• Laurea summa cum laude in Chemical Engineering, University of Bologna, Italy, 2005
• PhD in Chemical Engineering, University of Bologna, Italy, 2009
• Post Graduate Diploma in Tertiary Teaching, University of Canterbury, New Zealand, 2014

• Associate Member of IChemE
• Member of NZBio
• Investigator in the Biomolecular Interaction Centre, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

• Chemical Engineering Unit Operations 3 - CHEE09009

• Development of high resolution 3D Printing methods
• Bioseparations for the production of bioproducts/pharmaceuticals, focus on chromatography
• Wet resistant adhesives
• Material science, focus on biomaterials

• BSc., (Biotechnology and BioEngineering)
• MSc.R., (Biomedical Engineering)
• PhD (BioEngineering)

• Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellow

• Instructor of MSc Course: Nanomaterials in Chemical and Biomedical Engineering
• Co-supervision of MSc project students: Vibrational spectroscopy with machine learning in biomedical applications 

• Machine learning-powered vibrational spectroscopy
• Reagent-free and non-invasive early cancer detection 

Synthetic Biology

The bottom-up approach to synthetic biology aims to create life-like artificial cells from non-living components. Our group specialises in creating synthetic cells that contain multiple sub-compartments (analogous to eukaryotic cell organelles). To do this, we use droplet microfluidics and giant lipid vesicles (or GUVs). Once created, we can setup multi-step enzymatic reaction cascades between the compartments.These synthetic cells can shed light on natural biological cell functions but can also be used for industrial applications like biofuel production or in biomedical applications for drug delivery.

Lipid Membranes

Cell membranes need to be structurally complex in order to perform a multitude of cellular functions. Studying individual components, like biomembranes, is typically performed using real cells. However, isolating biomembranes from the rest of the cell can be difficult or impossible. Therefore, as an alternative, our lab uses model membranes. Here, different aspects of the membrane, such as lipid composition, permeability, and membrane proteins can be studied in isolated under controlled conditions, free from other cellular influences. Different types of lipid membranes serve as our models including GUVs on the micron-scale, and nano-sized lipid vesicles down to 100 nm. In addition, we also use these model membranes systems to study membrane fusion as well as ligand-membrane interactions. Key to our success is the development of our cutting-edge lipid vesicle formation methods including microfluidics and bulk emulsions.

Microfluidics

Microfluidic technology is used throughout the different research topics in the Robinson lab. We current focus on using microfluidics for the following applications:

• Single cell handling and analysis (including cancer cells, and active swimmers).
• High-throughput production of monodisperse lipid vesicles (via double emulsion templating).
• Advanced handling, manipulation (flow, compression, electrofusion), and analysis of lipid vesicles.

Designing, fabricating, and testing novel microfluidic systems for new applications also makes up its own unique line of research.

• Microfluidics.
• Bottom-up synthetic biology.
• Lipid vesicles.
• Membrane fusion.
• Advanced microscopy: including FLIM, confocal, multiphoton, and high-speed capture.
• Single cell handling and analysis.