Tzahi Cohen-Karni is an Associate Professor at the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science engineering in Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA USA. He received both his B.Sc. degree in Materials Engineering and the B.A. degree in Chemistry from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, in 2004. His M.Sc. degree in Chemistry from Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, in 2006 and his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA, in 2011. He was a Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston Children’s Hospital at the labs of Robert Langer and Daniel S. Kohane from 2011 to 2013. Dr. Cohen-Karni received the 2012 International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Young Chemist Award. In 2014, he was awarded the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation Young Investigator Research Award. In 2016, Dr. Cohen-Karni was awarded the NSF CAREER Award. In 2017, Dr. Cohen-Karni was awarded the Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Rising Star Award, The Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award and The George Tallman Ladd Research Award. In 2018, Dr. Cohen-Karni was awarded the Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Young Innovator Award. In 2019, Dr. Cohen-Karni was awarded the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT) Dean’s Early Career Fellowship.

Prof. Gianluca Maria Farinola

Professor of Organic Chemistry

Pro-Rector for Research and Innovation

Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

Adjunct Professor Department of Biomedical Engineering

Tufts University

Boston (Medford), USA

Vice President of The Italian Chemical Society (2020-2022)

Elected President of the Italian Chemical Society (2023-2025)

Chemistry Europe Fellow

https://www.farinolagroup.com/

ORCID ID 0000-0002-1601-2810

https://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/11144950/Great_People_Dont_Need_to_Show_Off.html

Gianluca M. Farinola completed his PhD in 1996. He was Assistant Professor from 1996, Associate Professor from 2003 and from 2015 he is Full Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Bari Aldo Moro.

He has been visiting researcher at the University of Muenster, Germany (2009), invited visiting professor at the University of Strasbourg , France (Institut de Science et d’Ingégnerie Supramoléculaire – ISIS) (2013 and 2014) and at the University of Angers and CNRS, France (2015) and visiting scholar at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University, US (2017 and 2018), where he was appointed as Adjunct Professor in 2019.

Roles in Scientific Societies and other appointments

From 2017 to 2019 he was the President of the Organic Chemistry Division of the Italian Chemical Society, and from 2018 to 2021 the President of the Division of Organic Chemistry of EuChemS.

He is presently Vice-President (2020-2022) and elected President (2023-2025) of the Italian Chemical Society.

From 2016 to 2018 he has been Consultant of one of the Italian Parliamentary Commissions.

He is member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Chemistry and Materials Science Department of CNR (Italian National Research Council) (2019-2022).

He is member of the Chemistry Europe Council.

He is also member of the International Advisory Board of the European Journal of Organic Chemistry.

He is co-founder of a spin-off company SYNCHIMIA s.r.l. of the University of Bari started in November 2008.

Research

Gianluca Farinola is a synthetic organic chemistry who sets up new methods to produce photo- and electro- active molecules, supramolecular structures and materials  for applications ranging from organic photonics and electronics to biology.

In the last ten years his research has opened intriguing directions by exploiting photosynthetic microorganisms (e.g. algae and bacteria) and biological polymers (e.g. melanin, fibroin, lignin, biosilica) as sources of sustainable materials for future optoelectronics and biomedicine.

He is author of about 200 publications and 110 invited lectures in national and international conferences and schools, in Universities and Research Institutes.

He is PI of many national, international and industrial research projects.

He is recipient of the Ciamician Medal of the Italian Chemical Society and of the “Innovation in Organic Synthesis Award” of the Interuniversitary Consortium CINMPIS.

He has been appointed Chemistry Europe Fellow in 2019.

Yael Hanein is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Tel Aviv University, VP of scientific affairs at Nano Retina and CTO and founder at X-trodes. In the past she conducted research at the Weizmann Institute (MSc and PhD in Physics), Princeton University (visiting student), and at the University of Washington as a post-doc fellow. Her research field is neuro-engineering, focusing on developing wearable electronics and bionic vision.

C. Tortiglione is researcher at CNR since 2001, heading the Nanobiomolecular group at Istituto di Scienze Applicate e Sistemi Intelligenti "E.Caianiello" (ISASI-CNR, Pozzuoli) of National Research Council since 2007. After completing her graduate research at Istituto di Genetica e Biofisica (IGB-CNR, Naples), she spent two years at University of Edinburgh, in the laboratory of Developmental Biology (Prof. M. Bownes). Back in Italy she received her PhD at University of Naples, developing new skills in Plant Genetics and Biotechnology, followed by several postdoctoral appointments. At ISASI  she launched new research lines merging Biology to Nanoscience. Beside basic investigations on key pathways controlling development and cell differentiation using cell and molecular biology tools, the novelty of her research is the development and the use of nanoparticle-based methods for analysis of gene and cell function, manipulation of intracellular pathway, optical and magnetic hyperthermia, controlled drug delivery. Recently, she is exploiting the possibility to use organic semiconducting polymers to control cell function. She demonstrated the possibility to modulate animal behaviour and light sensitivity by using photovoltaic nanoparticles, and is currently using these materials for therapeutic purposes. More recently she exploited the possibility to use the biocatalytic machinery of living organisms for fabricating functional hybrid bioelectronic interfaces, fully integrated into the tissues, using semiconducting oligomers as build blocks