Diego Montagner
Diego is a lecturer at the Department of Chemistry in Maynooth University (Ireland) since 2016. He received his PhD in Molecular Science at the University of Padua (Italy) in 2008. After few years of postdoc in Germany (Dortmund University) and at National University of Singapore, he was awarded of the Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Galway, Ireland, before obtaining a lecturer position at the same institute. Main current research interests: bioinorganic chemistry with particular focus on metals in medicine. Montagner group aims to synthetize new efficient metal-based drugs that could selectively accumulate in the cancer tissues decreasing the dramatic side effect associated with the current cisplatin chemotherapy.
In particular we are interested in:
- Pt(IV) prodrug complexes with targeted axial ligands;
- Cu(II) complexes that interact with the DNA via different pathways;
- Au(I) carbene and Te(IV)-OO complexes as antimicrobial compounds;
- metal based complexes (Cu(II), Zn(II), Fe(III)) that act as metallo-nuclease enzymes.
Despite the young career as independent researcher, his reputation is internationally recognized as demonstrated by the number of publication (28) in peer review journals, twenty of those as first or correspondent author. He has been invited speaker in several National and International Conferences and Symposiums. In 2013 he was awarded of the postdoc Marie Curie Fellowship with a project entitled “Copper Metallonucleases” and in 2014 he was awarded the best young scientist oral presentation at the EUROBIC Conference (European Conference in Bioinorganic Chemistry) in Zurich. Among hi national and international collaborators we can include Dr. Andrew Kellett (DCU, Ireland), Dr. Barbara Fresch (UniPD, Italy), Dr. Raffaele Ricco’ (TU Graz, Austria), Andrea Erxleben (NUIG, Ireland), Valentina Gandin (UniPD, Italy), Pablo Sanz Miguel (Zaragoza University, Spain), Ang Wee Han (NUS, Singapore), Paul Dyson (EPFL, Switzerland) and Daniele Lo Re (IRB, Spain).
