Martina leads research in mixing and fluid dynamics applied to bioprocesses and has applied her novel techniques and rigorous approach to obtain fundamental understanding of single-use bioreactor technologies and in increasingly important sectors like cell and gene therapy, continuous production of monoclonal antibodies and vaccine manufacture. She is currently co-Director of the Future Research Vaccine Manufacturing Hub (Vax-Hub) with Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert (University of Oxford).

Her main line of research focuses on the fundamental engineering characterisation of upstream technologies for improved scale-up. She has applied her expertise in the use of advanced optical techniques for the measurement and quantification of flow characteristics and mixing dynamics to different systems: bioreactors, primary recovery and scale-down. She has established an entirely new area within the department focused on the characterisation, design and use of single-use bioprocess technologies, which have led to key outcomes in prestigious journals. Martina has worked on automated microscale bioprocessing techniques and has recently applied these to new areas, namely process development of novel glycoconjugate vaccine technologies and as novel high throughput methods for mammalian cell culture perfusion processes.

Current grants include the EPSRC DHSC Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub (Director, EP/X038181/1), which was recently awarded a 1 year Continuation grant and additional funding EP/X03867X/1), and several industrial awards and EngD students, co-funded by the EPSRC Doctoral training Centre in Bioprocess Engineering (EP/L01520X/1 and EP/S021868/1) and companies like Pfizer, Pall Biotech, AstraZeneca. MSD among others.

Martina has had a long-standing involvement with Engineering Conferences International (ECI) having chaired sessions and presented at their Integrated Continuous Biomanufacturing, Vaccine Technologies and Single-Use Technologies conferences. She was Co-Chair of the Single-Use Technologies conference in 2017 and 2021 with Magali Barbaroux (Sartorius) and Weibing Ding (Amgen).