Reaching for the quarks

Host

Angela Agostiano

Angela Agostiano is the President of the European Chemical Society (EuChemS) and the Chair of the EuChemS Task Group on Inclusion and Diversity. 

She is Professor Emeritus at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy. Her area of expertise is chemical-physical processes. She was the President of the Italian Chemical Society (SCI) from 2017 until 2019.

Moderator

Noah Al-Shamery 

Noah Al-Shamery is currently serving as the Communication Team Lead on the board of the European Young Chemists’ Network (EYCN) and as National Chair of the young Physical Chemists (yPC) in the German Bunsen Society for Physical Chemistry (DBG). He also represents EYCN in the European Institute for Industrial Leadership (EIIL) and contributes as Social Media Officer for the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE).

Noah is currently affiliated with the Chemistry Department at the University of Warwick (UK) and the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where his research focuses on utilising nature-inspired polymers, such as melanin, for sustainable electrochemical applications.

Speakers

Iwona Gulaczyk

Iwona Gulaczyk is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Chemistry, Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) in Poznań, since 2024. She earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry from AMU in 2000 and was promoted to habilitated doctor in 2022.

Her research focuses on high-resolution molecular spectroscopy of non-rigid molecules and quantum chemical calculations, particularly for astrophysical applications. She has received several awards, including Rector’s Team and Individual Awards. From 2014 to 2023, she served as the Erasmus+ Coordinator at AMU. She also conducted research at Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve (1995-1996) and is an active member of the Polish Chemical Society.

Giulia Napoli

Giulia Napoli holds a Master’s Degree in Chemistry from the University of Palermo. She currently serves as the First Technical Director of the Italian State Police, Deputy Ministerial Councilor, and Director of the Chemical Investigations Division at the Forensic Science Police Service in Rome.

With extensive experience in applying cutting-edge techniques, she specialises in the analysis of illicit drugs, latent print detection, materials and microtrace analysis, explosives and inflammables, fire investigations, handwriting and document fraud analysis, as well as the regeneration of vehicle identification numbers (VINs).

Sílvia Osuna

Sílvia Osuna received her PhD in 2010 from the University of Girona (UdG) at the Institut de Química Computacional (IQC). Since 2018, she has held the position of ICREA Research Professor at UdG.

Her research bridges computational chemistry and biology, focusing on biochemical processes related to enzyme catalysis. Her lab is developing computational tools to predict amino acid changes in enzyme structures that enable new functions. The goal of her work is to streamline the computational design of efficient enzymes for industrial use.

Sílvia Osuna has received several awards, including the Spanish Young National Research Award ‘María Teresa Toral’ (2023), Emerging Scientific Talent award of Societat Catalana de Química (2023), EuChemS Lecture award  (2022), among others. Her research is supported by the European Research Council’s Consolidator Grant (2022-101088032), among other sources.

Snežana Zarić

Snežana D. Zarić holds a B.S. and Ph.D. in Chemistry from Belgrade University and completed postdoctoral research with Prof. Michael B. Hall at Texas A&M University. In 2001, she received the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at Free University of Berlin. She was a Visiting Professor at Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg (2004) and at Texas A&M University in Qatar (2012–2017).

Currently, she is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Belgrade. Her research focuses on noncovalent interactions, transition metal systems, proteins, and organometallic reaction mechanisms. Zarić has delivered over 30 invited talks at international conferences and published over 160 papers, cited more than 4,000 times, with an H-index of 38. She is ranked among the top 2% of the most influential scientists in Inorganic Chemistry, according to the Stanford list (2020–2022).