Antonio Forente

PhD Programme: Nanoscience, Materials and Chemical Engineering
Research group: FiCMA – Physics and Cristallography of Materials
Supervisors: Xavier Mateos Ferré & Francisco Manuel Díaz González

Bio

Antonio Forente holds a bachelor's degree (2017) and a master's degree (2020) in Physics from Università degli Studi di Napoli "Federico II". During his career, Antonio Forente had the opportunity to collaborate with Physics and Optics Naples Young Students (PONYS) to several amazing outreach events for adults and kids. In 2018 he participated in the Erasmus+ project, carrying out the interchange period at Universidad de Zaragoza. In his master thesis, Antonio Forente collaborated in the development of an innovative magnetoelastic biosensor for pathogens in water and food, resulted in the publication of a paper (Nanomaterials 2020, 10(8), 1526).

Project: Fabrication of microfluidic devices for microplastics characterization and biosensing applications

Microparticles are present all around and inside us being invisible to the human eye, with a typical example being suspended microparticles in the sea (microplastics), or bodily fluids (blood, saliva, urine, etc.). Although invisible, they still contain information that can give an indication of water toxicity, or even act as biomarkers for specific diseases, such as HIV or cancer.
As an example, plastic -based products, including microplastics in water, represent around the 80% of the marine debris. However, the sampling and analytical techniques for the identification and quantification of such microplastics in water, sediments and biological tissues samples are difficult to apply as routine analysis, basically due to the high time consuming, low robustness and high cost. Therefore, the search for a miniaturized functional device capable of identifying and quantifying in real time microplastics in liquid samples is clearly needed.
In the present project, the design, fabrication, and characterization of a functional microfluidic device with optical detection is aimed for flow cytometry applications. The advances of the present project with respect the state-of-the-art are related to the miniaturization, in-situ analysis and low cost with respect other under study approaches.

Outreach activities

• European Researchers' Night 2022: "Fluídica para todos".