Stefano Donadio, PhD
Founder, CEO, & President of the BoardStefano Donadio is Founder and CEO of NAICONS. He has over 30-year industrial experience in large, medium-size and startup companies involved in natural products and antibiotics, with extensive experience in company founding, management and securing dilutive and non-dilutive funding. He has contributed to disruptive technologies in microbial products, as well as to developing marketed, clinical stage and first-in class antibiotics. He is the author of over 150 publications and patent applications in the fields of natural products and natural products-producing bacteria. He holds a degree in Chemistry from The University of Naples, Italy, with post-doctoral experience at Johns Hopkins University and The University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Sonia Maffioli, PhD
Co-Founder, & Chemistry DirectorSonia I. Maffioli is Co-Founder and Chemistry Director of NAICONS. She has over 25-year industrial experience in large, medium-size and startup companies involved in natural products and antibiotics. Her experience spans from discovery and drug development to natural products chemistry and metabolomics. She is the author of over 60 publications and patent applications in the fields of natural products and drug discovery. She holds a Chemistry degree with post-graduate training in Synthetic Chemistry from The University of Milan.
Margherita Sosio, PhD
Co-founder, COO & Board MemberMargherita Sosio is Co-Founder, COO, & Board Member of Naicons. She has extensive research experience with more than 30 years of senior-level leadership in biotech industry (from major pharma companies to SMEs). Her research focuses on the discovery of new metabolites from microbial sources and on the development of new molecular tools in Natural Products research. She is the coauthor of over 100 peer reviewed articles and book chapters, and 7 patents derived from her contributions to the discovery and characterization of novel microbial compounds. She holds a degree in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Milan and conducted her postdoctoral research studies at University of Pavia, IT and at ETH, Zuerich.
Ermenegildo Beghé
Co-Founder, CFO, & Board MemberCo-founder and CFO. He has a consolidated experience in finance, controlling, project management, organization, and M&A. Since 2008 he has been a financial and strategic advisor for several companies in various fields of business. He served previously as CFO in two high tech listed companies, Brainpower and Biosearch, where he also contributed to very successful deals. He holds a degree in economics from Bocconi University, Milan.
Luca Spampinato
Board MemberLuca has a degree in Physics from the University of Milan, is a computer scientist and entrepreneur. He has co-founded several companies (Brainpower, Workinvoice, DevAls, Stockflix and Quinary, one of the first European artificial intelligence start-ups) and has carried out important research activities in the field of IT systems architecture and artificial intelligence, with over 30 publications behind him. His knowledge in computer science, his business experience, and his specialization in AI, will be extremely important for the development of the micro4all platform.
Franco Ricchiuti
Advisory Board MemberMarketing and Communication Expert Entrepreneur. A specialist in Innovation, for over 25 years he has played a leading role in the evolution of Media, Marketing services, Advertising, and Music. In particular, since the mid-90s he has held roles as founder or top leader in the major Italian companies in the Digital Communication field in groups as Cell Network, TBWA and FCB. He is today the promoter of a new entrepreneurial path in the world of video content production, with a special focus on the YouTuber environment, with the opening of House264 a Creative Tech Factory accelerated by Cariplo Factory. For the past two years, he has been a trainer and video coach and has created a course designed to help professionals to better manage their presence in front of a camera, whether making a video or participating in a video conference or webinar. He has trained over 800 business managers and professionals.
Justin van der Hooft
Advisory Board MemberSince January 2020, Justin van der Hooft has been an assistant professor at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His research vision is to bridge the gap between what we can see in metabolomics profiles to what we can actually learn from them. His group is working on computational metabolomics methods and tools to improve metabolite annotation in untargeted metabolomics experiments, in particular for natural product discovery. The overarching aim of his research is to better understand the chemical language of nature, so we can stimulate beneficial interactions to create more resilient ecosystems, such as by finding the rightly composed soil microbiome that result in drought-tolerant plants. Justin has always been fascinated by the chemical diversity in nature, and this bridges nicely to what NAICONS is doing when mining for novel bioactive molecules in its large bacterial strain collection.
