Massimo M. Santoro obtained his Master's Degree at the University of Turin, Italy, and obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the Open University of London, UK. He completed his post-doctoral training at the University of California in San Francisco, USA. Upon his return to Italy in 2008, he established his first independent laboratory at the University of Turin's Molecular Biotechnology Center. At age of 43, he was appointed Full Professor and Group Leader at the VIB Vesalius Research Center of the University of Leuven, Belgium. In 2018, he joined the University of Padua as Chair of Cell Biology at the Department of Biology and in 2020 the Venetian Institute of Molecular Medicine (VIMM) as Principal Investigator. He has been awarded an EMBO (2004) and HFSP (2005) long-term fellowships, as well as the HFSP Career Developmental Award (2008), the Marie Curie Reintegration Grant (2010), the Odysseus-FWO Career Grant (2014), the ERC Consolidator Grant (2016), ERC Proof of Concept (2020), the Telethon Grant (2021) and PRIN Grant (2022). He is currently an Associate Editorial Board member of Cancers, Cardiovasc Res, Scientific Reports, Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology and Executive Board Member of EVBO (European Vascular Biology Organization).

His lab is focused on studying how cell signaling and metabolism regulate endothelial biology and cancer progression. To accomplish this goal his lab is taking advantage of innovative genetic and imaging technologies as well as new molecular and metabolic approaches in vertebrate models, such as zebrafish and mouse.