Julian Melchiorri is a British Italian inventor and engineer working on biotechnology, biomimetic engineering and advanced manufacturing.

Julian is the founder and CEO of Arborea. He was recognised by Forbes as a leading social entrepreneur under 30 years of age. He received the “Simon Peres Heritage Award” for social innovation from the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the British Land’s “Emerging Talent Medal 2017” from the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. He is also a start-up mentor at Plug & Play Tech Centre in Sunnyvale, California, and a visiting tutor at the double masters programme “Innovation Design Engineering” (IDE) jointly run by Imperial College London and Royal College of Arts. He won the first “Engineering Fellowship” at the prestigious V&A supported by the UK National Lottery.

Julian is a TEDx speaker, a prolific public engager, and he enjoys sharing with people his vision for a healthier and sustainable future. In 2019 he was invited to the UN for a round table discussion with Ban Ki Moon, the Dutch Prime Minister and European Union Leaders to represent young social entrepreneurs. He gave talks in major venues such as the London City Hall, The European House Ambrosetti think-tank at Villa D’Este, Forum Vertigo at Centre Pompidou, The Queen’s Birthday Party at the British Embassy in Rome, SynbiTECH at Queen Elizabeth II Centre, and more. His work was exhibited at world’s major venues such as the World Economic Forum, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, Victoria & Albert Museum (with his Bionic Chandelier (2017), part of the museum’s permanent collection), Downtown Dubai, Natural History Museum London, …

In 2014, Julian received a double MSc from Imperial College London and RCA in "Innovation Design Engineering" (IDE), a leading-edge, interdisciplinary course that focuses on the exploration and development of impactful innovation through disruptive thinking, experimentation, exploration of emergent technologies and advanced engineering.

During his studies Julian widened his knowledge on biotechnology, and developed his skills in robotics, materials and advanced manufacturing. His intention was to mimic nature’s efficient technologies to find solutions to societal and environmental challenges. For his Masters thesis Julian focused his attention on photosynthesis, the oldest and most important chemical process on earth on which all life depends, exploring methods to harness it, to control it, to make it a versatile tool for man-made systems, more versatile than the photosynthesis driven by plants. His thesis culminated in Silk Leaf (2014), the first of a long series of his future photosynthesis-powered inventions. Silk Leaf was a biological material/device that could carry out biological photosynthesis for a determined period of time. It was a material mostly made by fibroin silk proteins with bio stabilization properties and chloroplasts extracted from plant cells; it was fabricated with embedded microfluidic channels to deliver water and nutrients throughout the material, mimicking leave’s microchannels and implementing Murray’s mathematical law for an efficient liquid distribution. However, the technology had a short life span, and, after his graduation, Julian kept researching and experimenting with new photosynthesis-driven technologies with the support of research grants from the UK and the European Union.

In 2015 Julian founded Arborea in order to industrialise photosynthesis and make it a global tool for the production of sustainable food and biochemicals. Over the last century, humanity has been burning fossil fuels and destroying plant life forcing a change in the atmosphere and climate, in other words it has been reverse-terraforming our planet. The global population is constantly growing, and we will need 50% more food by 2050; however, crop yield increase is slowing rapidly, and it is hard to find new land for agriculture. With these problems in mind, Arborea is industrialising photosynthesis to expand the world’s food supply and to accelerate the transition to a sustainable food system where healthy and sustainable food will be the primary choice, not the alternative.