Matteo Gallidabino

Matteo is an emerging academic in Forensic Chemistry and Chemical Criminalistics. He studied at the prestigious School of Criminal Justice of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, where he first received his BSc and MSc degrees both with First Class final awards, and later his PhD degree in 2016, with a thesis on the temporal profiling of volatile gunshot residue.

After his PhD degree, Matteo was awarded a research fellowship by the Swiss National Science Foundation for a Post-Doctoral Fellow position at King’s College London, where he led several projects in forensic and environmental sciences. In particular, he was involved in the development of new HRMS-based strategies for the chemical detection and profiling of hazardous material, including inorganic explosives. He then joined Northumbria University in 2018 as an Assistant Professor in Forensic Science, where he established a research group in Chemical Criminalistics. He finally re-join King’s College London in 2022 as a Lecturer in Forensic Chemistry, where he keeps leading research on the analysis of chemical evidence, with a focus on gunshot and explosive residues, as well as contributing to advancing the criminal investigations of crimes involving hazardous materials.

Despite being still early on in his career, Matteo has published many papers in highly-ranked forensic and analytical journals. For his outstanding academic performance and high quality of research, he received two excellence awards, including a Faculty Prize in recognition of the contribution of his PhD thesis. He has been a Visiting Researcher at a number of police institutions (such as, for example, the Italian Carabinieri in Rome) and has a successful track record in obtaining research grants, in addition to strong connections with a number of academic and industrial partners.

Matteo is a Member of both the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Chartered Society of Forensic Science, as well as be Member of the Editorial Board for a number of analytical and forensic journals. In particular, he is Assistant Editor for Forensic Science International, which is one of the most influential academic journals in the field of Forensic Science.

Matteo’s research focuses on the analysis of chemical evidence and is highly inter-disciplinary, spanning different fields such as analytical chemistry, chemometrics and computer sciences. In particular, he is author of numerous innovative works where he successfully combined next-generation instrumental techniques with advanced data analytics, to provide enhanced information in a forensic context and better support the Criminal Justice System in the decision-making process. Notable recent achievements include the development of an AI-driven approach for the reconstruction of mutable chemical profiles to enhance evidential linking of energetic materials in the investigation of shooting incidents and terrorist attacks. His interests further extend in the assignation of evidential values to the acquired evidence through the use of probabilistic methods.

Current projects include:

1. Developing of new analytical methods for the analysis and profiling of energetic material residues , in order to enhance their source attribution and association.
2. Investigating the mechanisms leading to the formation of background levels of energetic material, to improve the evidential assessment at activity level in terrorism-related cases.
3. Developing of new AI-driven approaches, based on advanced chemometrics and machine learning, for the in-silico profiling of mutable traces and their kinetic modelling.
4. Exploring the application of hierarchical probabilistic models for the interpretation of chemical evidence, to assign probative values in a forensic context and guide future data acquisition.