Challenges and prospects in organic photonics and electronics Faraday Discussion

Luisa Torsi received her Laurea degree in Physics from the University of Bari in 1989 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Sciences from the same institution in 1993. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Bell Labs from 1994 to 1996. In 2005 and 2006 she was invited-professor at the University of Anger and Paris 7. Since 2005 she is a full professor of chemistry at the University of Bari and since 2017, she is an adjunct professor at the Abo Academy University in Finland.
In 2010 she has been awarded the Heinrich Emanuel Merck prize for analytical sciences, marking the first time the award has been given to a woman. The IUPAC - International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry awarded her with the 2019 Distinguished Women in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering. The analytical chemistry division of the European Chemical Society (EuChemS) conferred her the Robert Kellner Lecturer 2019. Prof. Luisa Torsi is also the winner of the Wilhelm Exner Medal 2021, a prize awarded since 1921 by the Austrian Industrial Association to celebrate excellence in science. The Exner Medal awardees include also more than twenty Nobel prizes. The Italian President, Sergio Mattarella invited Prof. Torsi at the Quirinale to personally congratulate her on this award.
Since 2020 she has been appointed National Representative for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action of Horizon Europe by the Italian Minister for Education and Research. She is also past-president of the European Material Research Society, the first woman to serve in this role. Torsi has been also elected 2017 Fellow of this society, for pioneering work in the field of organic (bio) electronic sensors and their use for point-of-care testing. She is also Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry since 2022. Presently she is serving as Vice-President of the Scientific Committee of the Italian National Research Council.
Awarded research funding for over 30 million € comprises several European contracts as well as national and regional projects. She is coordinating the “Single molecule bio-electronic smart system array for clinical testing – SiMBiT” a H2020-ICT-2018-2020 research and innovation action working on liquid biopsy for pancreatic cancer early detection. She has also coordinated a “European Industrial Doctorate” Marie Curie project in collaboration with Merck and a Marie Curie ITN European network as well as several national PRIN projects; was also a principal investigator in an ICT STREP proposal. She has also been the scientific coordinator of a Structural Reinforcement PON Project awarded to UNIBA for 2012-2014 and is engaged with several other Structural Reinforcement PON projects.
Torsi has authored almost 230 ISI papers, including papers published in Science, Nature Materials, Nature Communications, PNAS, Advanced Materials, and is co-inventor of several international awarded patents. Her works gathered almost 15.500 Google scholar citations resulting in an h-index of 60. She has given over 190 invited lectures, including almost 50 plenary and keynotes contributions to international conferences.
Prof. Torsi is committed to the role of model for younger women scientists. She has been giving several talks on this topic such as a TEDx talk. Prof. Torsi is one of the 100Experts (https://100esperte.it) a project led by Fondazione Bracco comprising an online databank with the names and CVs of female experts in STEM, a sector historically underrepresented by women but strategic for the economic and social development. In a recent campaign to foster the idea of gender equality in science among children, prof. Torsi was featured in a story of TOPOLINO (Italian comic digest-size series of Disney comics), as “Louise Torduck”, a successful female scientist of the Calisota valley.

Hiroyuki Nishide is a Research Professor in the Research Institute for Science and Engineering and served as a Full Professor in the Department of Applied Chemistry (1987–2018), Waseda University, Tokyo. He received his Ph.D. in 1975 and was Humboldt Research Fellow at the Free University Berlin. He was awarded with Prize for Science and Technology by the Ministry of Education, and Chemical Society of Japan Award. He is a past president of the Society of Polymer Science, Japan, and of the Federation of Asian Polymer Societies. His research interests are on the syntheses and applications of functional polymers including conjugated polymers and organic redox polymers, with a recent focus on organic polymers for rechargeable batteries, photovoltaic cells, and (photo)electrochemical devices.

Prof. Chihaya Adachi obtained his doctorate in Materials Science and Technology in 1991 from Kyushu University. He held positions as a research chemist and physicist in the Chemical Products R&D Center at Ricoh Co., a research associate at Shinshu University, a research staff at Princeton University, and an associate professor and professor at Chitose Institute of Science and Technology. In 2005, he returned to Kyushu University as a professor and was promoted to a distinguished professor in 2010, and his current posts also include director of Kyushu University’s Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics Research (OPERA) since 2010 and director of the Fukuoka i3 Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics Research since 2013. His research has been concentrated on organic synthesis, device fabrication, and optical and electrical device characterization of organic semiconductors. He has been serving as an editor of “Organic Electronics” (Elsevier) (2007-2019) and CCS Chemistry (2019-). His publications include over 670 research papers. He won Nishina Memorial Award (2017), Nagoya Silver Medal (2019), etc., and was selected as a highly cited researcher (Clarivate) (2018-2022).

Kunio Awaga received his DSc from The University of Tokyo in 1988, then worked as a research associate at the Institute for Molecular Science. In 1992, he returned to The University of Tokyo as an associate professor in the Department of Pure and Applied Sciences, and in 2001 he moved to Nagoya University as a professor in the Department of Chemistry. His research interests are molecular magnetism, organic electronics, molecule-based energy storage, and topological physics and chemistry for molecular materials.

Dr. Jenny Clark has worked in the field of spectroscopy of pi-conjugated molecules for over 15 years. After her PhD (Cambridge) she worked at the Politecnico di Milano in Italy on all-optical switching in plastic optical fibres before returning to Cambridge to take up a Dorothy Hodgkin fellowship and the Charles and Katherine Darwin Fellowship. During this time she also had two children. She moved to the University of Sheffield in 2015 where she won a Vice Chancellor’s Fellowship. She is now a Senior Lecturer (part-time) and co-directs the Lord Porter Ultrafast Laser Facility in Sheffield. Her group's research currently focusses on the physics of triplet-pair states and strong exciton-photon coupling in molecular systems and carotenoids.

Xugang Guo is currently a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech). He received his B.S. and M.S. degree in Chemistry from Lanzhou University under the guidance of Prof. Zhengyin Yang in 1999 and 2002, respectively. He joined Mark D. Watson’s group at the University of Kentucky in 2006 and obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2009. From 2009 to 2012, he carried out his postdoctoral training with Prof. Tobin J. Marks and Prof. Antonio Facchetti at Northwestern University, and joined SUSTech as an associate professor in 2012. He was promoted to full professor in Spring 2018. His research mainly focuses on organic semiconducting materials, particularly n-type polymer semiconductors, and their optoelectronic devices, such as organic field-effect transistors (OFETs), organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs), organic thermoelectrics (OTEs), organic photovoltaics (OPVs), and perovskites solar cells (PSCs).

Christine Luscombe is currently a Professor and Chair of the Faculty at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Okinawa, Japan. After receiving her Bachelor’s degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 2000, she worked with Profs. Andrew Holmes and Wilhelm Huck in the Melville Laboratory of Polymer Synthesis at the University of Cambridge where her research focused on surface modifications using supercritical carbon dioxide for her PhD. She received the Syngenta Award for best organic chemistry project for her PhD. In January 2004, she joined the group of Prof. Jean Fréchet at UC Berkeley for her post-doctoral studies where she began her research on semiconducting polymers for organic photovoltaics. She was the recipient of the Lindemann Fellowship and the Trinity College Junior Research Fellowship (University of Cambridge) for her post-doctoral studies. In September 2006, she joined the Materials Science and Engineering Department at the University of Washington, Seattle, and moved to Japan in 2021. Her current research focuses on the synthesis of semiconducting polymers for organic electronics and has published >140 papers in this area of research. She is currently serving as the President of the IUPAC Polymer Division.

Rebeca Marcilla received her PhD in Chemistry in 2006 from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in the field of ionic liquids and polymers with application in electrochemistry and nanotechnology. After a postdoctoral stay at the University College London she joined CIDETEC (Centro de Tecnologías Electroquímicas, Donostia-San Sebastian). In 2010 she moved to the Unit of Electrochemical Processes IMDEA Energy (Madrid) and in 2015 she became Senior Researcher. During her fruitful scientific career, she has acquired proven experience in advanced materials for energy storage (eg. ionic liquids, polymer electrolytes, redox-active polymers, etc) and in next-generation batteries including organic batteries and redox flow batteries). As a result, she has co-authored 7 patents (1 of them licensed to a private company) and published more than 115 articles, achieving an h-index of 44. She has supervised 12 PhD thesis (6 presented+6 on-going) and several postdoctoral researchers. In 2017, she was awarded with a ERC Consolidator Grant to develop Membrane-free Redox Flow Batteries. Dr. Marcilla is member of the Governing Board of the Electrochemistry Group of the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry (GEE-RSEQ).

Dr. Nakatsuka is a senior scientist at the Laboratory of Biosensors and Bioelectronics at the ETH Zürich. She was raised in Tokyo, Japan and moved to the U.S.A. for her Bachelor's in Chemistry at Fordham University (Bronx, NY) and pursued her Ph.D. at UCLA (Los Angeles, CA). Upon receiving the prestigious ETH Zürich postdoctoral fellowship, she moved to Switzerland and now leads a team focused on interfacing DNA-based receptors (aptamers) with nanoscale electronic biosensors to detect diverse small molecules such as neurotransmitters. For this work, she was named an MIT Under 35 Pioneer in 2021 and
received the iCANX Young Scientist Award and ACS Rising Star in Measurement Science Award in 2022. She has mentored almost 40 Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Ph.D. students at the ETH Zürich in diverse projects ranging from small-molecule biosensing to single-molecule peptide sequencing, and navigation of neural networks using advanced surface chemistries. Dr. Nakatsuka is also passionate about social justice, outreach, and education. She was awarded the Norma Stoddart Prize for Academic Excellence and Outstanding Citizenship in 2018 for her contributions in community outreach combined with her scientific achievements. She also received the Hanson-Dow Excellence in Teaching Award for her exceptional teaching and dedication to students in 2015. She is currently an active member of the Diversity Team at ETH and has contributed to initiatives that raise awareness and spark discussion about anti-discrimination within Switzerland. She has also illustrated a children’s chemistry book: “A is for Atom: ABCs for Aspiring Chemists”.

Dr Bob C. Schroeder, born in Luxembourg, received both his BSc (2008) and MSc (2010) in Chemistry from the Free University of Brussels (ULB) before moving to Imperial College London to carry out his doctoral studies under the supervision of Professor Iain McCulloch FRS. After completing his PhD (2013), Bob moved to the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University (2014) as a Postdoctoral Research Associate (PDRA) in the group of Prof. Zhenan Bao. His work in Stanford focused on the development of self-healing conjugated polymers for stretchable skin-like electronics.
In Spring 2016, Bob joined the Materials Research Institute and the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at Queen Mary University of London as an Academic Fellow, and Principal Investigator. In early 2018, Bob relocated his research group to the Department of Chemistry at University College London, to take-up an appointment as Lecturer, and where he is currently an Associate Professor of Organic Chemistry and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. The group’s current research focuses on the development of organic materials for energy and healthcare applications.