Since December 2004 I am PhD Student at the University of Mons-Hainaut in Mons, Belgium. I was working at the Materia Nova research center under the supervision of Prof. Roberto Lazzaroni and involved as a PhD student in the Marie Curie Training Network CHEXTAN (Chiral Expression and Transfer At the Nanoscale). Since December 2008 I am a Marie Curie Fellow in the Theory group of the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany. I will defend my PhD thesis approximatively in September 2008.
In Mons I was working on the characterization of self-assemblies of chiral and achiral molecules using force field techniques. Quantum chemical calculations were used to probe the electronic properties, i.e. charge transport, for some interesting assemblies. During this work I was strongly interacting with experimental groups working in synthesis and Scanning Probe Microscopies (STM/AFM). In Mainz I plan to use coarse graining to study the formation and the morphology of assemblies and gels of Tetrathiafulvalene (TTF) derivatives, which are promising molecules for possible molecular electronic applications.
I studied Material Science at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano (Italy) and I received my diploma in March 2004. In my diploma thesis I was investigating with force field simulations the conformations of oligothiophenes included in zeolite nanochannel.