Prof Alberto Saiani was awarded an European PhD in 1997 by the Université Louis Pasteur, (Strasbourg, France). Following his PhD he was awarded a Fellowship by the Japanese Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS), which allowed him to spend one year as postdoctoral research fellow at Osaka University (Japan). In 1998 he was recruited as postdoctoral research associate at Imperial College in the Chemical Engineering department where he staid two years. In September 2000 he was appointed to a lectureship at the Université Blaise Pascal (Clermont-Ferrand, France) and in September 2002 he was appointed to a lectureship in Molecular Materials in the School of Materials, The University of Manchester. In 2013 he was awarded an EPSRC Fellowship and founded a company dedicated to the commercialisation of the peptide hydrogel technology developed in his group.

Prof Alberto Saiani  research focuses on the characterisation of polymer and biopolymer materials across the length scales and in particular on the understanding of the chemical architecture - thermodynamic - structure - physical property correlations in complex polymeric systems using state of the art techniques which include neutron and X-ray small angle scattering on large scale facilities. His work encompasses a variety of polymeric materials including: proteins, petides, polyurethanes, polyureas and polyesters.

In 2013 he was awarded an EPSRC Research Fellowship to extend his work on the development of a technological platform for the design of scaffolds (hydrogels) exploiting the self-assembly of de novo designed short peptides for biomedical applications.

He recently also extended his work in the field of polyurethane based resins design for multiscale composite manufacturing.

Group website: Polymers & Peptides Research Group

Department of Materials groups: Polymers Composites and Carbon & Biomaterials