Carbon nanotubes or graphene?
A study of functional composites

Silvia Marchesan / University of Trieste

November 4, 2021, 1 - 2 pm CET

Online live talk

Introduction

The family of carbon nanostructures has attracted great interest for their unique physico-chemical properties. The importance of their discovery was recognized with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for the fullerenes and in Physics in 2010 for graphene. There is a wide morphological and structural diversity within carbon nanomaterials that includes also dots, nanotubes, nanohorns, nano-onions, and so on. Their added value is manifest especially in composite materials, for applications that span from sensing and medicine, to energy, construction and the aerospace industries. However, which nanocarbon is the best one to attain functional composites is a question that in most cases doesn't find a straigthforward answer. In this presentation, Silvia Marchesan will highlight recent studies where nanocarbon morphology exerted important effects on the properties and performance of the resulting composites, or even hybrid materials - when new properties emerged.

Silvia Marchesan

obtained her master's degree in fullerenes chemistry under the supervision of Professors Prato and Da Ros in Italy in 2004. She then received a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Edinburgh (UK) and performed research at University College London, the University of Helsinki as Academy of Finland Fellow, and Monash University/CSIRO in Australia as CRSS Fellow. In 2013 she returned to Trieste (Italy) where she set up the Superstructures Lab thanks to a starting grant. In 2018 she was promoted to Associate Professor in Chemistry and received the National Habilitation as Full Professor. She was selected by “Nature” magazine amongst the top Rising Stars in the natural sciences worldwide (2018) and by “Nature Chemistry” amongst the international profiles charting the future of the discipline (2019). Her multidisciplinary research was the topic of several notable lectures, such as the Aulin-Erdtman Lecture (2019, Sweden), the Howard Lecture (2020, UK), and the RSC Soft Matter Lecture (2021, UK).

Silvia Marchesan is guest editor together with Sharali Malik and Arkady Krasheninnikov of the thematic issue "Advances in nanocarbon composite materials" in the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology.