Danilo Bertagna Silva graduated in Chemical Engineering from the State University of Campinas (Brazil) in 2015. During his undergraduate period, he spent a year at the University of Hull (UK) where he also worked on the obtainment of biofuels via solar energy and vegetable oils. Danilo had professional internship experiences in the Membrane Innovation Centre (Czech Republic) as an operator and evaluator of an electrodialysis stack for dye purification, and also as a wine-making apprentice engineer at the Guaspari winery (Brazil). In 2018 he got his M.Sc. degree from the Erasmus Mundus joint program “Chemical Innovation and Regulation” in the University of Barcelona (Spain) and wrote his thesis “UV Light-Assisted Ozonation For Micropollutant Removal in Domestic Wastewaters”.

In 2019 Danilo was hired as a predoctoral researcher by the NOWELTIES project, an Innovative Training Network part of the framework of EU Horizon 2020’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. His research focused on the development, evaluation and optimization of UV-LED based photolysis and photocatalysis for the removal of contaminants of emerging concern from water. During the project, he spent 3 years in the Faculty of Chemical Engineering and Technology, University of Zagreb (Croatia) and 6 months in the Catalan Institute for Water Research (Girona, Spain). In 2022, Danilo was awarded with a PhD degree in Environmental Chemistry. In 2023 he worked for a brief period at the National Institute of Chemistry (Slovenia) as a postdoctoral researcher investigating the catalytic hydrogenation of carbon dioxide to methanol. In 2024 Danilo was granted the EU Horizon ERA postdoctoral fellowship for the project REALIMP: “Real-time imaging and photocatalysis mediated biodegradability of microplastics in a continuous flow system”, with the support of the Instituto Superior Tecnico of the University of Lisbon (Portugal).