Manuel holds a bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Universita’ di Pisa, Italy, and a master’s degree in Cell, Tissue, and Biotechnology Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. During his master’s program, he completed an internship at the Center for Nanomedicine and Tissue Engineering at Niguarda Hospital in Milan, Italy, where he completed his thesis project on the development of 3D cultures for spinal cord injury repair. In 2024, he worked as an engineer at River BioMedics, where he specialized in cardiac tissue culture and cardiac drug discovery.
In 2026, Manuel joined the Applied Stem Cell Technologies group at the University of Twente as a PhD candidate under the supervision of Robert Passier. His project will focus on creating next-generation 3D cardiac tissues to increase throughput and standardization for their integration into the cardiac drug discovery pipeline.