The University of Salento will be conferring an honorary degree in "Medical Biotechnology and Nanobiotechnology" on Maurizio Prato, Ikerbasque Professor and AXA Chair of the Center for Co-operative Research in Biomaterials CIC biomaGUNE, Professor of the University of Trieste and member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
The ceremony will be held at 16:00 hours on 30 June, and will be broadcast via streaming from the Congress Center of the University of Salento.
The Rector of the University of Salento Fabio Pollice said "it is an honor for our University to be able to confer this recognition on Professor Maurizio Prato who, originally from Salento, has built a prestigious international career. The proposal by the Department of Sciences and Biological and Environmental Technologies of our University to confer the award has emerged out of the recognition of the exceptional scientific value of a research career characterized by a strong interdisciplinary nature in areas ranging from nanobiotechnologies to nanomedicine and biomaterials".
“I am delighted about this honorary degree," said Giorgio Parisi, president of the Accademia dei Lincei, "which represents an important and well-deserved recognition of the work by our member Maurizio Prato, whom I warmly congratulate".
A researcher since 1983 in the Department of Organic Chemistry of the University of Padua, Maurizio Prato was appointed associate lecturer in Organic Chemistry at the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Trieste in 1992, becoming a tenured lecturer in February 2000. Since 2015 he has been an Ikerbasque Research Professor and AXA Research Professor at the CIC biomaGUNE research center. He received two prestigious ERC grants in 2008 and 2020; he was appointed a member of the following bodies: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in 2010, the European Academy of Sciences in 2013, the European Academy in 2015 and the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in 2018. In 2013 he was appointed honorary professor at the Jiao Tong University in Xi'an (China). He has done research at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, USA (1980), University College Dublin, Ireland (1983), Yale University, (1986-87), and at the University of California, Santa Barbara, (1991-92). He has been professeur invité in the Departments of Chemistry at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris in 2001, at the University of Namur (Belgium) in 2010, at the University of Strasbourg in 2014, and at the University of Mons (Belgium) in 2018 in the context of the Francqui Chair.
He has had over 700 papers published in prestigious international journals with a total of more than 70,000 citations and an H-factor of 114. He received an honorary degree in Materials Science from the University of Tor Vergata in 2014 and a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Castilla-La Mancha in 2016. He has been an associate editor of Scientific Reports (Nature Journals) since 2015 and of ChemSusChem (Wiley) since 2015. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of ACS Nano (ACS since 2014) and Chemical Physics Letters (Elsevier). He has received a whole host of awards; they include the Ree-Natta Lectureship of the Korean Chemical Society (2010); the Blaise Pascal Medal of the European Academy of Sciences (2013); the Giulio Natta Gold Medal of the Società Chimica Italiana (2014); the European Carbon Association Award (2015); the Franco-Italian Chemical Societies Award (2015); the ACS Nano Lectureship Award, American Chemical Society (2015); the ChemPubSoc Europe Fellow (2018); and the Richard Smalley Award of the Electrochemical Society, USA (2019).
His research interests include the synthesis of innovative carbon-based functional materials for applications in materials science, nanomedicine and catalysis; the synthesis and structural determination of organic compounds with potential biological activity; new synthetic methodologies and organic and bioorganic reaction mechanisms.