Congratulations to our PhD student Amanda Arcidiacono for her talk at WATOC 2025 in Oslo, the international conference of World Association of Theoretical and Computational chemists. The title of the presented talk was "Understanding excited states of carotenoids in environments with Machine Learning". The study of carotenoids' excited states in complex environments is crucial for understanding natural processes involved in photosynthesis and photoprotection. Machine Learning can be a powerful tool to obtain fast and accurate approaches to study these processes from a computational perspective.
Congratulations to our PhD student Elena Betti for “The Journal of Computational Chemistry best poster award” received at WATOC 2025 in Oslo, for her contribution entitled “First-principles picture of energy transfer in plant Photosystem II: excitation flows and their regulation”. In her contribution, she showed a protocol to model the complex energy transfer network of the huge protein supercomplex, unveiling some strategic principles for both efficient light harvesting and photprotection.
Congratulations to our PhD candidate Matteo Pugliesi for his work entitled “Low-Iridium Containing Ir–Ru–W Nanocomposite for Acidic Oxygen Evolution Reaction: The Role of Tungsten on Its Activity and Stability” published on ACS Applied Energy Materials. Iridium oxide-based electrocatalysts are widely considered as the most practical anodic catalysts for proton exchange membrane water electrolysis (PEMWE) due to their high activity as well as their exceptional stability in the acidic oxygen evolution reaction (OER).
Congratulations to our PhD candidate Andrea Giovanelli for his work entitled “Retro-Favorskii reaction employing fluoride sources and its use as immobilization strategy” published on the Journal of Fluorine Chemistry. Retro-Favorskii is the reaction that converts propargyl alcohols into the alkyne and ketone precursors. This reaction is commonly used to deprotect terminal alkynes with elimination of acetone.
