DrFrancesco Luciano

Francesco Luciano studies how animals move and how they adapt their motion to their environment. He combines physiology and biomechanics to explore how body size, gravity and evolution shape legged locomotion. As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in David Labonte's Evolutionary Biomechanics Group, he leads InvertInsects, a project aimed at discovering how much energy insects spend when they walk upside down – as they might do on our lab ceiling.

Francesco joined Imperial in 2026, after being a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Milan, Italy. There he also worked in the Locomotion On Other Planets laboratory, a facility co-run with the European Space Agency that emulates low gravity. Francesco trained as a physician-scientist at the same university, earning an MD cum laude in 2021 and a PhD in Translational Medicine in 2025. He has held visiting positions at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom, and KU Leuven, Belgium.