Lorenzo Mercuri received his PhD from Sapienza University of Rome in 2024, with a dissertation on the Templar headquarters in Paris. He has held visiting fellowships and research appointments in France, the UK, and Italy. His research focuses on architecture and urban topography in the 12th and 13th centuries, particularly the military religious orders and the connections between architecture, written sources, liturgy, and memory.

At the HCMH, Lorenzo will develop a project on the varied plans of Templar and Hospitaller houses, from rural preceptories and urban compounds in the West to central convents and castles in the Latin East, setting normative sources against the built record and tracing how Benedictine, Cistercian and Eastern precedents travelled across the Mediterranean.