Pietro Cataldi is a Marie Curie Individual Fellow at the Smart Materials group at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)-Genova. He is working on the BioConTact project that targets developing a class of electrical conductors with tunable degradation for robotic tactile skin.
He finalized his M.Sc. in Physics at the Università di Genova in 2013, performing the thesis at the Electron dynamiX group of the Fritz-Haber-Institut in Berlin. He completed his Ph.D. in Bionanotechnology in 2018 at the IIT-Genova under the supervision of Dr. Ilker Bayer and Dr. Athanassia Athanassiou. In March 2018, he was sponsored by Ghelfi Ondulati S.P.A. to develop coatings to improve the mechanical properties of cardboard.
In September 2018, he moved to the group of Prof. Ian Kinloch and Dr. Mark Bissett at the University of Manchester National Graphene Institute, working in the EU graphene flagship. In 2020, he joined the group led by Dr. Mario Caironi at IIT-Milano, being part of the ELFO ERC project, whose goal is to develop electronic devices that are safely edible. In 2021, Pietro was awarded a Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship and moved to IIT-Genova in 2022.
He is interested in materials for flexible, green, and edible electronics and biopolymer-based composites for soft robotics.