It is with great pleasure that we announce that Raffaella Buonsanti, a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at EPFL in Switzerland, has been awarded the EuChemS Lecture Award.

The Lecture Award aims to celebrate and recognise the major achievements of one junior scientist working in chemistry in a country with a EuChemS Member Organisation. The winner will receive a statuette and the opportunity to give a lecture at the next European Chemistry Congress (ECC).

Raffaella Buonsanti obtained her PhD in Nanochemistry in 2010 at the National Nanotechnology Laboratory in Lecce (Italy), with Prof. Davide Cozzoli. Then, she moved to California where she spent over five years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, first as a postdoc and project scientist at the Molecular Foundry, with Prof. Delia Milliron (now at UT Austin), and after as a tenure-track staff scientist and principal investigator in the Joint Centre for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP).

She is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at EPFL in Switzerland.

Her group works at the interface of materials chemistry and catalysis, using colloidal chemistry tools to synthesise controlled and tunable nanocrystals and to advance the knowledge in electrocatalytic conversion of small molecules into value-added chemicals.

In her EuChemS Lecture, Raffaella will present recent efforts in her group towards the synthesis of Cu-based nanocrystals with different sizes, shapes and interfaces and their use as CO₂ reduction electro-catalysts. She will discuss their studies spanning from understanding the NC formation and their evolution during catalysis up to the implementation in devices which operate under commercially relevant conditions.

You can find out more about the EuChemS Lecture Award here.