Marinella Mazzanti was born in Vinci, Italy, quite a longtime after Leonardo. She obtained a Master’s degree from the University of Pisa in 1985 after spending a year in Columbia University (NY). She obtained a PhD from the University of Lausanne in 1990 under the guidance of Carlo Floriani. Her PhD work focused on Schiff base complexes of low valent vanadium, and small molecule activation. Shortly after she moved to the University of California, Berkely, where she worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the group of W. Armstrong before moving to the University of California, Davis, where she worked on cobalt and copper chemistry with Alan Balch. In 1994 she was awarded a two year Marie-Curie fellowship to join the group of Jean Claude Marchon where she worked on the design of metalloporphyrin catalysts at the French National Laboratory, CEA, in Grenoble.
Group website: https://www.epfl.ch/labs/gcc/mazzanti/