CURRICULUM VITAE OF MAURO MELLI

PERSONAL DATA

Name: Mauro Melli

Birth place / date: Sesto San Giovanni (MI),Italy / 24-07-1980
Nationality: Italian
Status: Married, no children

CONTACT DETAIL

Institution: C.N.R. IOM Laboratorio Nazionale TASC

Address : SS14, Km 163,5 Basovizza 34149 Trieste, Italy
Phone: +39 0403756458
Mobile: +39 3396665873
Skype: ilmaurone80
Email: melli@tasc.infm.it
mauro.melli@gmail.com

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH POSITION

Jan 2011- Present Postdoctoral Fellow at “Istituto di officina dei materiali” IOM-CNR, Trieste Italy

Oct 2006 – Oct 2010 PhD Student at International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA)-Trieste-Italy, Statistical
and Biological Physics Sector

Thesis title: Mechanical Resonating Devices and their Applications in Biomolecular

Studies.

Supervisors: Prof. Giacinto Scoles and Dr. Marco Lazzarino

Set 2004 - Jun 2005 Visiting Student at Queen Mary University of London - London - UK.
(Erasmus Fellowship)

Feb 2006 Master Degree in Physics at Università degli Studi di Milano - Italy, with full marks and
honor 110/110 cum laude. (Major in Solid State Physics)

Thesis title: Quantum Conductance in Carbon Nanotubes

Supervisors: Prof. I. Pollini and Prof. M. Baxendale

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

Resonating Pillar sensor (BioMEMS).

This project belongs to the field of the application of microfabrication for biological applications. In particular, I
explored the possibility to use mechanical micro resonator as mass sensor to characterize molecular self assembled
monolayers (SAM). I developed a new kind of resonators, tapered vertical micro-pillars. The pillar geometry allows
localizing the adsorption of molecules exactly to the end of the beam, by means of the directional deposition of a
metal layer on the top face of the pillar and a specific chemical interaction, typically gold-thiol. This geometry offers
the advantage that the adsorption can easily be driven only on the top in a relatively large surface exactly in the end
making the interpretation of the result much more easy respect to other shape like horizontal cantilever. Moreover,
hexagonal matrix of pillars showed locally a super hydrophobic behavior. In this configuration , by placing a drop of
the analyte solution on the device, only the top surface of the pillar is in contact with the liquid, while the pillars walls
are not exposed. I fabricated the devices and developed some procedures of the fabrication workflow. I built the
experimental set-up for measuring the resonance frequency of my devices, by means of optical deflection, and
performed the experiments optimizing the chemical and biological aspects. At present, I am exploring different
approaches towards a parallel and real time detection.

Characterization of the hybridization efficiency of ssDNA patches.

I used the pillar sensor to characterize ssDNA (single strand DNA) SAM. The probe density was measured by changing
the incubation time and the concentration of the solution. I have obtained two main results. The first is that the
kinetics of adsorption is much faster than the ones reported previously. The second is that the high probe
concentration (almost the saturation coverage) does not reduce the hybridization efficiency to 10%, as it was
reported, but to 40%. Both these discrepancies can be explained by the geometry of the substrate. In fact, the
kinetics of adsorption is limited by the diffusion of molecules, especially in the low concentration regime. However
the pillar detection reduces the effect of diffusion. In fact the molecular adsorption is governed by a 3-dimensional
instead of 1-dimensional diffusional field as for the extended surfaces used in the previous literature and in
commercial DNA microarrays. I founded that this configuration reduces two orders of magnitude the incubation time
of the hybridization process. The results of this work is going to be submitted for publication.

Chemomechanical functionalization of silicon microstructures.

I am also involved in a project for the chemomechanical functionalization of silicon microstructures. It was
demonstrated that cleaving silicon microstructures in a proper reactive ambient results in a spatially controlled
functionalization with strong covalent bond, through a carbon-silicon cycloaddition process. This approach, together
with a suitable design of the sacrificial silicon structures, provides the possibility of chemically functionalize the active
areas of a device with unmatched precision. We studied functionalization of three different molecules. Cleaved
surface analyses and the spectroscopic studies of the mechanically induced functionalization were performed.
LANGUAGES

Italian + English

TECHNICAL COMPETITION

During my PhD, I have learned many different techniques of microfabrication. Mainly: optical lithography, e-beam
lithography, e-beam deposition, RIE, ICP-RIE, PECVD, Sputtering. For characterization, I have constantly used SEM,
AFM. A second benefit that I have obtained during these years is that I have expand my knowledge in many and
different fields like optics, electronics, chemistry, finite element simulation, instrumentation programming.

COMPUTING

Environments: MS-dos/win, Linux.

Programming: c, Mathematica, Matlab, Labview

Software: Comsol, Igor, OriginPro, L-Edit,2D-3D Graphical Software, latex, MS/open office.

PUBLICATIONS IN JOURNALS

1. Inverted tapered pillars for mass sensing .

Melli, M., Pozzato, A., Lazzarino, M.
Microelectronic Engineering, 87 (5-8), pp. 730-733. (2010)
2. Chemical functionalization of atomically flat cantilever surfaces.
Toffoli, V., Esch, F., Melli, M., Pozzato, A., Tormen, M., Lazzarino, M.
Microelectronic Engineering, 86 (4-6), pp. 1200-1203. (2009)
3. Fabrication of a three-dimensional optical vortices phase mask for astronomy by means of electron-beam
lithography.
Prasciolu, M., Tamburini, F., Anzolin, G., Mari, E., Melli, M., Carpentiero, A., Barbieri, C., Romanato, F.
Microelectronic Engineering, 86 (4-6), pp. 1103-1106. (2009)
4. Intrinsically aligned chemo-mechanical functionalization of twin cantilever structures .
Toffoli, V., Esch, F., Melli, M., Cataruzza, F., Pozzato, A., Carrato, S., Scoles, G., Tormen, M., Lazzarino, M.
Nanotechnology, 19 (44), art. no. 445502 (2008)
5. Quantum conductance in single- and double-wall carbon nanotube networks.
Baxendale, M., Melli, M., Alemipour, Z., Pollini, I., Dennis, T. J. S.
J. Appl. Phys. 102, 103721 (2007)
CONFERENCE AND WORKSHOP

• Spring College on Water in Physics, Chemistry and Biology , The Abdus Salam International Centre for
Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy
• SLONANO 07 Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia (Oral presentation)
• International Workshop on Nanomechanical Cantilever Sensors 2008, Mainz, Germany (Poster presentation)
• Hot Nano Topics 2008, Portorož, Slovenia (Oral presentation)
• Modern Trends in Nanoscience 2008, Princeton, USA
• Nano-bio-sensing Summer School 2009, Lausanne, Switzerland (Poster presentation)
• Micro & Nano Engineering (MNE) 2009, Ghent, Belgium (Oral presentation)
• International Workshop on Nanomechanical Cantilever Sensors 2010, Banff, Canada (Oral presentation)