Teresa Pellegrino is an Italian chemist who, since 2014, is leading the Nanomaterials for Biomedical Applications research group at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, where she serves as Principal Investigator. As of July 2025, she has also been awarded the Mildred Dresselhaus Guest Professorship (Senior Award) 2025 by the Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging (CUI) at the University of Hamburg.

She earned her Master’s degree in Chemistry in 2000 and her PhD in Chemical Sciences from University of Bari in 2005. She began her career in nanoscience during her PhD, as a visiting student at UC Berkeley, and later continued her research at the Center for NanoScience in Munich under a Marie Curie Fellowship.

After a postdoctoral period at the National Nanotechnology Laboratory in Lecce, in 2009 she became a permanent researcher at the Nanotechnology Center of the Italian National Research Council (CNR).

She has received multiple European Research Council (ERC) grants, including a Starting Grant (ICARO) and an ongoing Consolidator Grant (GIULIa). She was also the coordinator of the FP7 Collaborative Project Magnifyco, involving 11 European partners. In addition, she has participated as a partner in two Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks (ITNs): MagneticFun and HeatNMof.

Pellegrino has co-authored over 155 peer-reviewed publications in high-impact journals and her research has led to significant innovation output, with 9 patent families at IIT (25 applications, 23 granted patents), as well as 5 earlier patents—many of which protect scalable synthesis methods for magnetic nanoparticles used in biomedical applications.

She was appointed Associate Editor of Nanoscale and Nanoscale Advances (2023–2025), and she currently serves as Guest Editor for two thematic issues of the same journals. Pellegrino’s research is aiming at advancing the use of nanomaterials in precision oncology, particularly in the development of nanotechnologies for cancer treatment, including drug delivery, magnetic hyperthermia, radiotherapy, phototherapy, and imaging.

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