**About the Editors**

**Valentina Cauda** is an Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Science and Technology (DISAT), Politecnico di Torino, head of the TrojaNanoHorse Lab (in brief TNHLab), and co-founder of the Interdepartmental laboratory PolitoBIOMed Lab.

Thanks to her ERC Starting Grant project (TrojaNanoHorse, GA 678151), which started in March 2016, she now leads a multidisciplinary research group of 18 people, including chemists, biologists, physicists, engineers, and nanotechnologists. Her main research topic concerns theranostic nanomaterials: the research team develops metal oxide nanomaterials from wet synthesis, chemical functionalization, and physical–chemical characterization up to their coating by lipidic bilayer from both artificial and natural origins, aimed for drug delivery, tumor cell targeting, bio-imaging. Metal oxide nanomaterials, like zinc oxide, mesoporous silica, titania, and metal (gold, silver) nanostructures, as well as liposomes and cell-derived extracellular vesicles, are investigated.

Valentina Cauda graduated in Chemical Engineering in 2004 at Politecnico di Torino and then received her Ph.D. in Material Science and Technology in 2008. After a short period at the University of Madrid, she worked as a Post Doc at the University of Munich, Germany, on nanoparticles for drug delivery and tumor cell targeting. From 2010 to 2015, she worked as a Senior Post Doc at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Torino, and then she moved, as Associate Professor, to Politecnico di Torino. In 2010, she received the prize for young researchers at the Chemistry Department of the University of Munich, in 2013, she received the Gioved`ı Scienza award, in 2015, the Zonta Prize for Chemistry, and, in 2017, the USERN Prize for Biological Sciences. She has 113 scientific publications and a Hirsch Factor of 35 (updated on November 2020). She holds 4 international patents concerning the use of metal oxide nanoparticles in nanomedicine. Prof. Cauda is the principal investigator of several industrial, national, and international projects raising more than € 5 million funds in all. The most relevant are the recently granted ERC Proof-of-Concept *XtraUS* N. 957563, the FET Open RIA *MIMIC-KEY*, the Marie-Slodowska Curie Action *MINT* N. 842964 (where she acts as supervisor of an incoming Post-Doc from abroad), and the ERC Starting Grant *Trojananohorse*.

More details available at https://areeweb.polito.it/TNHlab/.

**Giancarlo Canavese** is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Applied Science and Technology (DISAT), Politecnico di Torino and a member of the Interdepartmental laboratory PolitoBIOMed Lab and the Materials and Processes for Micro & Nano Technologies (Chilab Laboratory) at DISAT.

His main research topics concern sonodynamic technique enhanced by engineered nanostructures for theranostic applications, interactions of oxide nanoparticles under ultrasound activation with biomaterial structure, such as cells and extracellular vesicles, and acoustophoretic labs-on-chips for drug delivery, tumor biomarkers detection, and bio-imaging.

Giancarlo Canavese received his ME degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2004 and his Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2008 from Politecnico di Torino, Italy. From 2010 to 2015, he worked as a Senior Post-Doc at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy, where he studied nanostructured piezoelectric materials for biosensors and energy devices. From 2013–2014, he spent six months as a visiting scientist at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, Texas US, where he worked on a microfluidic lab-on-chip device to study drug delivery in microgravity conditions on the International Space Station.

He has 90 scientific publications and a Hirsch Factor of 27 (updated on November 2020). He holds 8 international patents about micro and nanotechnologies for biomedical applications.
