Dr. Maria Chiara Arno obtained her MSci in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology at the University of Padova (Italy) and her PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry at King’s College London (UK) under the direction of Dr. Sukhi Bansal. She then took up a Research Fellow position at the University of Warwick (UK), joining the lab of Prof. Andrew Dove. Dr. Arno began her independent academic career at the University of Birmingham in 2020 as a Birmingham Fellow joint between the School of Chemistry and the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences. Her lab focusses on the development of new polymeric biomaterials for a variety of applications in healthcare, from drug delivery to tissue engineering. She received the ACS Rising Star Award at the Bordeaux Polymer Conference in 2022 and the Felix Franks Biotechnology Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2023. She has recently been awarded a prestigious Future Leaders Fellowship from UKRI.