Livia Salvati Manni is a scientist specialising in colloidal chemistry, lipids, and surfactants, with a particular focus on the physicochemical behaviour of lipids in complex physiological and extreme environments.

She obtained her PhD from the University of Zurich in 2017, where she investigated the synthesis and phase behaviour of cyclopropanated lipids and their potential biomedical applications. From 2017 to 2019, she was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, studying water confinement in soft materials at sub-zero temperatures.

In 2019, Livia was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship to join the University of Sydney, where she employed neutron and X-ray scattering techniques to investigate lipid self-assembly in ionic liquids and the interactions between solvents, lipids, and membrane proteins.

In 2023, she worked with the ARC Training Centre for Green Chemistry in Manufacturing before joining the Australian Synchrotron as a beamline scientist on the SAXS/WAXS beamline. In 2025, she returned to Monash University as a postdoctoral researcher.