Ciao! I am Matteo, a writer, a geneticist, a neuroscientist. Thanks for visiting.
I left research, and academia, in 2022, and ventured into writing about science. I traded pipettes for keyboard and pen, swapped cutting-and-pasting DNA molecules for stitching words and sentences together, and switched from engineering viruses to designing technical documentation. It’s been a seismic change, but a rewarding and successful one.
This blog is my latest, and most ambitious, project: a corner of the internet where I share my passion for genomics, the study of the Code of Life. Here, we will explore and try to understand the core principles, puzzling oddities and mind-bending trivia of our genome and of other living beings. I will go beyond the “what”, analyzing the “how” and “why” of genomics.
Want to know more about me? Keep reading, please!
I have been immersed in genomics since my two master programs, continuing through two postdoctoral research stints. I worked on the genetics of sensory systems, neurogenomics of aggression, gene therapy for neurodegenerative diseases, gene editing using CRISPR-Cas9, and gene silencing via microRNA. Like a pinball machine, research bounced me between four countries and two continents. This journey spanned a decade, with one dramatic interruption.
My science journey, 2010 – 2022
In late 2019, I took an unplanned, and most violent, pause from life sciences—and I was very close to take an irreversible break from life itself. An SUV struck me down, and I nearly died. What followed was harrowing: a chunk of my skull surgically removed (that’s what a craniotomy is, I found out later), days in a coma, months between hospitals to rehab. I retrained my brain to think, my hands to move in coordination, my legs to walk.
I still bear signs of the accident—a massive scar running across my scalp, double vision (diplopia in medical terms) requiring special glasses, a flimsy sense of balance—but I recovered! By June 2021 I was back in a lab, cloning, editing, silencing, and sequencing DNA. It was a great achievement. My return did not last long, though.
My scar
In August 2022, I handed in my resignation. Had I fallen out of love with research? Not at all! But my passion for the grind of lab work, once a major source of excitement, had waned after another experiment failed. In addition, I had become disillusioned with academia, and with my chances to ever establish my own research team (I may write a post on this topic, some day…)
With less than three months to unemployment, I ventured into scientific writing for a biotech company in Oxford. Initially, I would write just for a living, a mere 9 to 5 job. But it soon dawned on me: I love writing about science! I like making science accessible, distilling the key elements of a study and placing them in context. As such, I started creating content on genetics, molecular and cellular biology, on my own LinkedIn profile (please, let’s connect!), for Scientia News, and for the Progress Educational Trust.
And here I am now, thrilled to share my passion for genomics in this blog!
I don’t do research with pipettes and agarose gels anymore, I do science with words.
WritinGenomics 