When I was sixteen, I played as a defender for Treviso against Barcelona in a youth tournament. We lost 5–0. Lionel Messi and Cesc Fàbregas were on the other side, and by the end of the match I understood that they were going to become professional footballers—and that I was not.
I continued playing competitively until I moved to the UK for my PhD. I was never the most naturally gifted player, but hours of deliberate practice had taken me close to the top of my level. Football taught me something I carried into science: hard work pays off.
It took me much longer to understand that hard work was only part of the lesson. Every experience—victory or defeat, encouragement or rejection—can teach us something. But first we must be willing to listen, face the challenge and work on ourselves.
I have always been fascinated by physics. As a child, I asked “why?” about everything. I wanted to understand how nature worked because nature is the only indisputably real thing—something that would persist even if humans did not exist.
I cannot remember a single moment when I decided that physics was for me. I do remember something a primary-school teacher told my mother, who was worried about my future prospects. Although I was only eight or nine at the time, the teacher told her that I could do whatever I set my mind to and that my possibilities were unlimited.
I believe this potential exists in everyone. But sometimes it matters enormously that someone we admire or trust says it aloud.
Not everyone did. My father discouraged me from attending the liceo scientifico. Later, he did not fully support my decision to study theoretical physics at the University of Padova. He thought I should choose a safer route to employment.
In retrospect, it was emotionally difficult. However, at the time, I did not think much about emotions or realise the impact those words had on me. The experience also taught me an important lesson: I cannot make my ambitions dependent on external approval.
At Padova, I struggled at first. Passing an exam—even with the minimum mark—felt like an achievement. Then I saw my peers getting higher marks, and I thought to myself, “If they can do it, I can too.” I changed my study habits, worked harder and eventually earned those marks, graduating from my MSc with a final mark of 110/110 cum laude.
My journey was not one of always having been excellent at everything. It is a story about discovering that work and determination can matter more than talent alone.
At Warwick, Matthew Turner welcomed me into his office, picked up a can full of tangled rubber bands and said, “Try to pull one out.” That simple challenge changed the direction of my career.
I had long been drawn to connections: between physics and biology, order and disorder, and apparently unrelated ways of describing nature. At high school, Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life? had introduced me to hereditary material as an “aperiodic crystal” and to life as a system far from equilibrium. Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics had encouraged me to look for analogies between quantum physics and Eastern philosophy. The rubber bands finally gave this instinct a physical object: polymers.
By connecting ideas from the physics of glasses with the behaviour of ring polymers, I computationally discovered a “topological glass”. In 2016, Matthew and I published “A topologically driven glass in ring polymers” in PNAS. It became the cornerstone of my PhD and is still the paper I am most proud of.
At the end of my PhD, I finally had my chance to move to Edinburgh. I joined Davide Marenduzzo’s group and, a few years later, pushed myself out of my comfort zone by joining experimental collaborators led by Nick Gilbert at the Institute of Genetics and Cancer.
I still remember the first time I saw human cells under a microscope. It looked like a stage full of fluorescent prima donnas: some cells spun, some moved, some died and others remained completely still. At that moment, I understood that if I wanted to model cells well, I first needed to appreciate the experiments.
Becoming a beginner again was refreshing. It also revealed another advantage of connecting fields. My theoretical background made me notice physical properties that a biologist might reasonably treat as incidental—such as the viscosity of a DNA solution.
I began cutting DNA with restriction enzymes and observing how its viscosity changed. That work combined theory, simulations and experiments in a single project and became our 2022 Nature Communications paper, “Topological digestion drives time-varying rheology of entangled DNA fluids”.
While writing it, I found one final connection. In 1970, Hamilton Smith and Kent Wilcox had used changes in DNA viscosity in work that led to the identification of HindII, the first Type II restriction endonuclease. Smith later shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Werner Arber and Daniel Nathans for the discovery of restriction enzymes and their application to molecular genetics. Half a century later, I could use Smith and Wilcox's measurements to help validate a modern theory of DNA fluids.
Between 2016 and 2018, I wrote many fellowship applications. All of them rejected.
My breakthrough did not come from making the next application incrementally safer. It came when one of my mentors encouraged me to step back and ask what the bigger picture was.
I had never thought of myself as a specialist. I have always been interested in too many things at once and had always been able to connect dots across fields. When I looked back, I realised that most of my curioisty around statistical physics, polymers, DNA, simulations and experiments had all revolved around one theme: topology.
That insight became the idea of “topologically active polymers”, inspired by the way proteins continually manipulate DNA topology inside cells. It also became the foundation of the Topologically Active Polymers Lab.
I also realised that those failed applications were not wasted years. They prepared me to recognise what my proposals were missing. The lesson was not simply “be more ambitious”. Big questions must be earned through the path that brings you to them—and sometimes a mentor slapping you in the face is needed to help you wake up from the torpor of safe and incremental science.
In 2021, I became a Royal Society University Research Fellow and received an ERC Starting Grant. Between 2021 and 2024, despite the disruption caused by COVID, my group grew from one person to fourteen.
I was still trying to be an active researcher: staying on top of every project, working in the lab, running simulations, writing papers and supervising students and postdocs when at work; while trying to learn how to be a good father at home with two young kids.
Then in 2023, I burned out.
That was when I understood that I could not be both an active researcher in the old sense and the leader of a rapidly growing group. A principal investigator is important, but the role is different. The job is no longer to be the most productive researcher in the room. It is to create the best possible conditions for the people in the team to grow, explore their full potential and do their best work.
In 2025, five years after my first lecturer position, I was appointed Professor and Personal Chair in Biomaterials at the University of Edinburgh. I was ambitious, and I worked very hard. I was also very, very lucky. I was in the right place at the right time, I had the right ideas, the needed skills, and had talented people in my group. Every choice I had made since university compounded in my favour. Change any one of those steps, and I might have ended up in a less favourable position—or failed to secure a permanent position at all.
Looking back, I kept betting on myself. Each challenge -- and even the burnout -- forced me to fail, learn and adapt, building on everything that had come before. And throughout this journey, I was extraordinarily lucky to rely on the unwavering support of my wife and, today, our three children.
Many students enter a PhD and then a postdoc through inertia because they do not know what else to do. Others underestimate how difficult and uncertain it is to win fellowships, grants and permanent positions.
Anyone considering this path should ask: What am I willing to trade for an academic career—and what am I not willing to lose?
During my postdoc, I often performed laboratory experiments during the day, then ran simulations or wrote papers at night. For me, that period was essential. It allowed me to acquire an unusual combination of skills and helped distinguish my work. I also had fewer commitments outside work than I would later have.
But this is not a universal prescription. Researchers differ in their health, finances, caring responsibilities and priorities. Long hours do not guarantee success, and productivity is not a measure of human worth.
The useful distinction is between intensity that creates growth and overwork that merely consumes time. Are you learning? Are you acquiring critical thinking skills and independence? Are you producing work that matters to you? Or are you only ticking boxes?
Hard work also means listening to your body. It means recognising when to push and when to rest. Football taught me that effort could close a talent gap. Rejection taught me to rethink my questions. Experiments taught me to look at familiar things differently. Mentors taught me to see possibilities I had missed. Burnout taught me that effort without judgment has limits.
This is why I am starting this Substack. I want to share the parts of an academic journey that do not appear in papers, seminars or polished CVs: rejection, luck, doubt, sacrifice, mentorship, wrong turns and the need to reinvent oneself as the job changes.
If there is one idea I hope you carry from my story, it is this: nothing that happens to you should be dismissed. A setback, an unexpected result or a difficult transition can become a teacher. Success does not come from experience alone, but from what you do with it. A Professor at Edinburgh is known to tell students "every experiment teaches you something, either about nature or about yourself".
If you are willing to listen to experiments & experience, to learn, to face the challenge and to work on yourself, every thing that happens to you can move you forward.
So let me leave you with a question: What is your present challenge trying to teach you?
Until the next time
Davide