Director of Research, CNR-NANOTEC, Institute of Nanotechnology, CNR-Bari
is currently Director of Research at the Institute of Nanotechnology CNR-NANOTEC of the Italian Council of Research and Professor of Materials Engineering in the Department of Chemistry at University of Bari. She is Coordinator of a European FETOPEN Project on 2D phase-change materials for ultrafast photonics, and as of 2008 she has been coordinating several European projects on nanomaterials, 2D materials and optronics under Horizon2020 and the 7th European Framework programmes. In 2019 she served as Deputy Director of the Institute of Nanotechnology. She has been invited lecturer at Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosi-Mexico (2015), at Japanese Physical Society, Tokyo, Japan (2012), at Dept. of Materials Engineering, Shandong University – China (2010) and visiting scientist at n the Department of Chemistry at Seoul National Univ. Korea for the development of graphene. She was also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chemistry Dept at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, working with Prof. Eugene Irene in surface science of semiconductors and at Ecole Polytechnique-Palaiseau/France working with Prof. Drevillon in development of spectroscopic ellipsometry for monitoring of materials growth. She received her PhD in Chemistry and Material Science from Bari-University in 1994. Her work on nano-optics, plasmonics, semiconductors growth, and low temperature plasma processing of materials has led to almost 300 publications in various journals, such as Nature Materials, Advanced Materials, Nano Letters, Nanophotonics and ACS Photonics. Her research work covers alternative materials for plasmonics, creating the concept of “broadband active tunable phase change plasmonics”. She is active in the chemical vapour deposition (CVD) of 2D materials such as graphene, WS2, GaS, gallenene etc. Nowadays, she is one of the pioneers of the phase-change 2D and transdimensional materials, including novel optically activated phase-change chalcogenies and oxide materials for femtoscale photonics and quantum technologies.