Petrozza is one of the 11 women scientists who have been awarded the prestigious Advanced Grant among 25 total recipients in Italy
A funding round for excellence in research with a high female representation: 11 out of 25 winning projects in Italy will be led by women scientists. Among them is Annamaria Petrozza, coordinator of the Center for Nano Science and Technology at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) in Milan, who is embarking on her third project supported by the European Research Council (ERC). Petrozza will focus on the development of new semiconductor materials for applications in optoelectronics and photonics, such as devices for energy conversion.
Today, the ERC announced the assignement of 281 “Advanced Grants” in 23 European Union member states, awarded to researchers of 32 different nationalities, with a total investment of €721 million under the Horizon Europe program. The Advanced Grant is a competitive funding scheme awarded by the ERC to researchers with proven scientific expertise and significant achievements over the past decade. Each grant, worth approximately €2.5 million over five years, provides senior researchers with the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to significant scientific breakthroughs.
Annamaria Petrozza is the coordinator of the Center for Nano Science and Technology at IIT and is recognized by the international scientific community as a “top scientist” in the study of materials. She has been listed among the Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate since 2018 and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry since November 2022. This Advanced Grant marks her third ERC award. In 2017, she won a Consolidator Grant for the SOPHY project, focused on studying and developing a new class of materials for optoelectronics. In 2020, she secured Proof-of-Concept (PoC) funding for the development of a flexible, large-area X-ray detector prototype, named FLE-X, for applications in medical diagnostics and industrial non-destructive testing (NDT) – such as infrastructure monitoring or innovating AgriTech by replacing traditional photographic plates and heavy, expensive, and bulky tools.
An electronic engineer with a Ph.D. in physics, Petrozza is originally from Matera. She worked as a researcher abroad in France and UK before returning to Italy in 2010 to join the IIT Center for Nano Science and Technology in Milan, where she is now the Coordinator, in addition to leading the Advanced Materials for Optoelectronics research line.
The project for which she has received the funding is titled EDO, an acronym for Electronic Doping of Soft Semiconductors, aiming to develop new instrumental techniques to control and enhance the electronic properties of innovative semiconductors, such as halide perovskites. These materials are known for their optical and electronic properties, such as high light absorption and excellent charge carrier mobility. They are also called “soft” because they are extremely responsive to external stimuli, including simple contact with other materials or interactions with light and electric fields.
Petrozza will identify a new process to design the amount of free electrical charges in these materials, defined as intentional electronic doping, by introducing modifications to their structure. The success of this process will be monitored through the development of a one-of-a-kind instrument: an advanced microscope using adjustable light sources (from infrared to X-rays) to study electronic and chemical dynamics in thin semiconductor films with nanometric precision.
The project will have a significant impact on the development of new materials for optoelectronics and catalysis, such as devices for microelectronics and energy conversion.
