Profile

I am Italian and I moved to UK because I did want to learn more about chemistry. In fact, I am currently doing my PhD in Oxford. Being a PhD means I am still a student, but rather than doing homework I am working in a chemistry laboratory.

When I am not in the lab, I love spending time outdoor, either hiking or climbing. To be honest, the thing I am missing the most from Italy is not the food, but the mountains. I used to live in a small village in the Apennines where every winter was snowing. One year there was so much snow that I went to the cinema skiing!

Now that I am staying at home, I am cooking a lot. We are currently 5 chemists living in the same house (yes, all PhDs) and we are having lot of fun baking. I think we are missing a bit the lab and we are substituting it trying the most difficult recipes we can find. After all, there’s lots of chemistry involved in cooking.

Finally, I love drawing and painting, as you can see in some of the photos.

I am a synthetic chemist, which means I make molecules.

First of all, I have to plan how to make them. This part can be quite fun and creative because there is never a single way of doing it. My goal is to make them in the minimum number of steps, because this is usually cheaper, faster and reduce the waste I generate. Ideally each step should also be “high yielding”, which means having a lot of the molecule I want and very little of others I don’t want.

Then I have to actually make the molecule in the lab. I like this part too, because I like to be able to create something and be very hands-on in my job. Sometimes things aren’t going quite as planned and I have to optimize a reaction. This is like trying to find the recipe for the perfect cake, trying to vary the quantity of flour, eggs, butter and sugar until it is truly delicious.

Being a synthetic chemist means I am spending a lot of time in the lab. Doing what? Setting up reaction which means mixing all the reagents following a recipe, sometimes warming them up or cooling them down and wait to get the product. Very much like making a cake (but don’t leak the spoon). Sometimes the recipe doesn’t exist or doesn’t really work, and I have to do lots of test (see the photo with the small containers: screening reactions) to find the best conditions. This is a scientific process where I varied a thing a time to understand what is really important. And it is the way to go to create new chemistry. Purification of the compounds is also another time-consuming task, but it is a good moment to chat with colleagues about new ideas.

When I am in the office, I analyse the data I collected in the lab, which sometimes is a bit like solving a puzzle. I also spend a lot of time planning. Usually there are many ways to make a molecule, so there’s a lot of space for creativity in the synthetic plan. Once I have designed it on paper, I can try it in the lab and if it doesn’t work try to devise a different route. Planning is required also when I have to think of which screening reactions are most useful to answer the questions I have. And of course asking the right questions is very important. Finally, I spend few hours reading about new chemistry and having lots of chats with my colleagues to develop ideas.

Then is the time of communicating what I have discover. This can be done in writing, in a paper, or speaking at conferences all over the world. This is very nice because allows me to travel a lot.

Screening reactions: lots of tests to make a truly delicious cake

The reaction on the left is heated up and done in conditions that exclude the air to get inside the reaction vessel. The reaction on the right is cooled down and one of the reagents is added drop by drop.

Me presenting my work at a conference

Me presenting my work at a conference