He started university in 2011, attending the Bachelor’s Degree Course in Chemistry at the University of Florence, during which the increasing interest in the analytical and environmental sector leaded his choice for the curricular internship towards water quality supervision. As a matter of facts in 2014, he started a 7-month internship at the Florentine potabilization plant (Publiacqua S.p.A.) where he and the his corporate tutor had developed and optimized a UPLC-MS2 direct injection method for the determination of linear perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs) inside surface and drinking waters. This has been the starting point of the collaboration between he and the research group where he is nowadays working with, in facts the cited method was used for the publication of a paper on Talanta (Volume 176, 1 January 2018). After Bachelor’s Degree, he attended from September 2015 to April 2017, the Master’s Degree course in Environmental and Analytical Chemistry, during which he deepened the knowledge of theoretical and technical principles of essential analytical instruments such as IR and UV-Vis spectroscopy, GC-FID / ECD, GC-MS, ion-exchange chromatography, ICP-AES and ICP-MS, in addition to the functioning of all the environmental compartments. During this period, he grew up his interest towards the research activities, thus he decided to attend the Master’s Internship at the Florentine Department of Chemistry; the final elaboration for the Degree, based on a 6-month laboratory activity, was centred on the optimization of an automatic extraction system (on-line SPE) for the determination and quantification of selected pharmaceuticals compounds in water matrices, by LC-MS2 analysis, exploiting Quality by Design in the extraction process. Currently, he have an R&D Scholarship within the LabPur collaboration between the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florence and G.I.D.A. S.pA. which its principal aim is the monitoring of emerging organic pollutants within environmental matrices (mainly aqueous sources) and to develop “high through-put” analytical methods (HPLC and UHPLC-MS2, HPLC-DAD, GC-MS) to meet the growing demand from the national and European regulatory panorama of sensitivity in the quantification of potentially toxic substances for the environment and the human beings. Moreover, he’s involved in the European project ERANET-MED “Irrigatio”, in which the project partners are evaluating the transferability of organic and inorganic micropollutants to selected and characterized plants and fruits by irrigating them with treated wastewaters from a wastewater treatment plant; the final goal of this 3-year project is to assess the potential safety in recycling the treated waters for the crop irrigation.
