Marcella De Divitiis  

Financed projects:

NBFC – The National Center 5 “National Biodiversity Future Center”

Industrial projects:

Pirelli Tyre – a) Design of environmental-friendly rubber composites driven by biodegradability assessment
b) Enzyme-mediated approach for tuning the polarity of cellulose as a reinforcing filler in elastomeric compounds

Marcella de Divitiis holds a Masters Degree (2021) in Industrial Biotechnology from Università Milano-Bicocca, with a master thesis in enzymology, experience from which she collaborated to her first scientific paper. Then, she won a research fellowship in the same university aiming to biotechnologically valorise dairy waste. Here, she published two scientific papers, one of which as first author. 

In 2022, she won a PhD grant in Material Science on a project funded by Pirelli Tyre S.p.A aiming to assess the biodegradability of rubber compounds, with her work focusing on investigating rubber-degrading microbial communities and microbial action on materials, with the goal of rational-designing sustainable rubber compounds to enhance their biodegradability. 

She participated in national and international conferences and spent 6 months abroad in Prof. W. Streit’s lab, at Hamburg University, where she focused on metagenomic analyses of tyre-deriving microbial communities and biofilm formation on rubber surfaces.