Federico achieved his undergraduate degree in physics from Imperial College, London, his master’s degree in bioinformatics from the University of Milano Bicocca, and his PhD from the University of Milan, while working at the IFOM-IEO Campus in the group of Andrea Ciliberto. His PhD was on the subject of cellular motility and actin dynamics and he built a mathematical model to explain different phenotypes in multiple cell lines. During his postdoc, Federico worked on the study of cell polarity, using fission yeast as a model organism. He used network approaches to study how the cell polarity network interacts with other key cellular processes, and he developed a particle-based model to explain the role played by protein clusters in establishing polarity.