Professor Alessandro Troisi

I love the creative aspect of the profession. The scientific work should be a bit unpredictable, with a moderate amount of provocation, fun to read or to hear about. We have idiosyncrasies, passions and opinions and I am happy to let people know about them through my work. My obsession is making falsifiable predictions about the future, which can be seen as a boring Popperian ideal of the past century, or simply the fun part of being a theoretician.

We are witnessing what can be considered a tightening competition between traditional reductionist chemical science based on the careful generation and testing of interpretable models and the ability to achieve chemical knowledge through statistics and large amounts of data (AI for short). I am looking forward to seeing in the next decade which chemical domain will be radically changed, how would the teaching of chemistry be affected and what skills we are going to value most in the chemist of the future.

Of so many metrics that dominate our academic life, I am proud of one in particular: the number of past group members that decided to and managed to establish an independent research group (now spread across the UK, Ireland, Italy, China, India, and Czechia). I like the idea of our work taking a new life, being contaminated by many different minds, and ultimately becoming new and beautiful science somewhere else. I imagine this because I can see all that I do today containing traces of discussions and experiences with my many mentors.

We translate our passion for chemistry in different ways: working with many or few collaborators, spreading thin across many topics or just working on one topic in a lifetime, working on the next lecture or the next research paper. A good research culture values the individual preferences and recognizes that there are different pathways for personal realization that fulfil the mission of our institutions.