Francesca Santoro is a biomedical engineer specializing in neuroelectronics. She earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Naples Federico II, followed by a PhD from RWTH Aachen and Forschungszentrum Juelich in 2014. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University until 2017, she was the Principal Investigator of the Tissue Electronics Lab at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia from 2017 until 2022 when she joined FZJ as associate professor and group leader. Since 2026, she is Full Professor, Chair of Neuroelectronics at RWTH Aachen, and Director of the Institute of Biological Information Procession – Bioelectronics (IBI-3) at FZJ.
Her awards include the MIT Technology Review Under 35 Europe and Italy (2018), an ERC Starting Grant (2020), the Falling Walls Breakthrough Award in Engineering, and early career award from the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. She has published over 90 peer-reviewed articles and delivered more than 80 talks at major international conferences. Her main research areas are organic bioelectronics and biointerfaces, organic neurohybrid systems.