Michele Curioni, PhD

I have worked for many years on the methods that make corrosion measurable: electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, electrochemical noise, real-time hydrogen measurement, and optical imaging, all coupled with more traditional technological methods. My research career has been built around a central question: what can we read from a signal, and where does conventional interpretation stop being safe? More recently, I have developed machine-learning and large-language-model approaches to interpret corrosion data for organic coatings, asking the same question at the next layer up: what can a model read from these signals, and where do its conclusions require scientific judgement?

More than fifty of my papers focus on how surface treatments and organic coatings determine the long-term corrosion behaviour of components in aerospace and industrial environments. The thread across my work is the link between process parameters during surface treatment and the in-service durability of the treated component, evaluated by advanced corrosion testing methods.

I also have led and contributed to research on corrosion in nuclear power systems, stress corrosion cracking, materials behaviour in high-temperature water, magnesium corrosion for both lightweight structural and biomedical-implant applications. These projects, conducted with industrial partners and academic collaborators worldwide, share a methodological discipline: testing protocols designed to make accelerated laboratory data say something defensible about service-life behaviour.

In 2023 I founded CorroZone to apply the same methodological discipline to AI tools for corrosion practice — first as online education for researchers and technical staff, then as tailored corporate workflows that bring AI to legacy laboratory data, accelerate analysis cycles, and build domain-specific tools that the academic literature does not yet offer. The work at CorroZone is continuous with the research: methodology comes first, data is curated and labelled with scientific care, and every claim has a signature.

Since 2022 I have served as Associate Editor of Corrosion Engineering, Science and Technology — one of the field's longest-running peer-reviewed journals — where I handle submissions, select reviewers, and oversee peer-review decisions across the breadth of corrosion science. The editorial role is continuous with the rest of the work: it is about making sure claims are checked, methodology is interrogated, and the published record stays defensible.