Rate My Professor Lorenzo Santorelli

Dr Lorenzo Santorelli serves as Programme Director for Biological Sciences and Senior Teaching Fellow in Zoology at the University of Surrey, where he also acts as Senior Tutor for International Placements in the School of Biosciences. A biologist with longstanding interests in nature and animals, particularly insects, he specialises in evolutionary biology, zoology and microbiology. He teaches modules covering animal diversity, animal behaviour, the evolutionary origin of biodiversity, animal biology, molecular biology, man and the environment, and microbial communities, with a focus on developing courses in zoology for Biological Sciences and Veterinary Biosciences programmes.

Santorelli graduated with honours in Biological Sciences from the University of Florence and completed his MSc and PhD at Rice University in Texas, USA. He previously held positions at the University of Leeds and the University of Oxford, including roles as Junior Research Fellow for St Cross College and Associate Director of the Doctoral Training Centre. His research examines the evolution of cooperative behaviour in macro- and microorganisms through an interdisciplinary approach involving entomology, molecular biology, genetics, animal behaviour and microbiology. Key publications include works on cheater-resistance in social amoebae (Nature, 2008), facultative cheater mutants in Dictyostelium discoideum (Nature, 2008), co-evolutionary dynamics in Pseudomonas aeruginosa (Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 2015) and loss of social behaviours in cystic fibrosis infections (PLoS One, 2014). He has received the Lynne Millward Award for academic staff member of the year at the University of Surrey.