I was born and raised in Switzerland and studied chemistry at EPFL, where I had the chance to pursue a variety of undergraduate research projects in the laboratories of Profs Paul J. Dyson (organometallic and medicinal chemistry), Pierre Vogel (asymmetric synthesis) and Geoffrey Bodenhausen (NMR). I  carried out my final MSc project in the laboratory of Nicholas J. Long at Imperial College London in organometallic and supramolecular chemistry- a first taste of UK research! After graduation in 2006 I started my doctoral studies, still at EPFL, and I obtained as PhD degree in Chemistry in 2010 in the laboratory of Prof. Kay Severin, with a thesis entitled “Metal-based chemosensors for important bioanalytes”.  Thanks to two consecutive post-doctoral Fellowships awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation I then joined the laboratory of Prof. Timothy M. Swager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I pursued numerous projects related to the development of polymer-based materials for organic electronics and sensing applications.  After three years at MIT, I relocated to the UK, where I took a R&D position at Procter&Gamble. The call of academic research the strongest, I returned to academia at the University of Bath in 2016 to develop nanoporous composites for hydrogen storage (with Profs Andrew D. Burrows, Chris R. Bowen and Timothy J. Mays), and finally at the University of Bristol where I started my independent scientific career in May 2019.