Franco Cheli

PhD Student

I have a bachelor’s degree in Natural Sciences, accomplished at the University of Florence during which I focused on plant biology. My bachelor’s thesis regarded Bryophytes ecology and that’s where my passion for microscopy started. Infact, the use of microscopy is mandatory in order to determine Bryophytes species. After my studies in Italy, I decided to move to Finland to attend the Master’s degree programme in Biomedical Imaging at the University of Turku. After graduating with a Master’s thesis about nanoparticles uptake in plants, I got accepted into the PhD programme in Atomic and Molecular Photonics at LENS department, University of Florence. My PhD project consists in the development of a light-sheet microscope for human brain fast imaging which should be able to image up to one cubic centimetre of human brain per hour in four colors at micrometric, isotropic resolution. At the same time, I’m taking part to the Human Brain Project in Francesco S. Pavone’s team. In addition to this, I have built a structured illumination microscope and a laser scanning confocal
microscope and I also have an expertise is electron microscopy.