Annamaria Petrozza
Italian Institute of Technology
How Serendipity and Personal Choices Guided Me Through Materials and Career Explorations
Women in Material Science is not a single category we can put in its box – it is the ensemble of multiple stories where part of the game is played by serendipity, part of the game is played by how we drive our choices. Annamaria will share her personal journey through science and technology, starting as one of the few girls in the class of electronic engineering, to her research experience in an industrial environment, until her research activity in a research institute. The leitmotiv of this path has been her passion for emerging semiconductors, a huge library of materials which provide us a great tool to design functional devices.
Annamaria Petrozza received her PhD degree in physics from the University of Cambridge in 2008 with a thesis on the study of optoelectronic processes at organic and hybrid semiconductors interfaces under the supervision of J.S. Kim and R.H. Friend. From July 2008 to December 2009 she worked as research scientist at the Sharp Laboratories of Europe, Ltd on the development of new market competitive solar cell technologies. In 2010 she joined the newly founded Center for Nano Science and Technology (CNST) of the Italian Institute of Technology in Milan. Since 2013 she's led the “Advanced Materials for Optoelectronics” Group. Her research is focused on the development of new, sustainable, optoelectronic technologies which can be extensively integrated in the everyday life.
She received the “Innovators Under 35 Italy 2014” award by the MIT Technology Review for her pioneering work on perovskites. She has been selected among the “Emerging Investigators 2017” by the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2022 she was awarded the "Innovation in Materials Characterization Award" by the Materials Research Society. Since November 2022 she is a Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry. She is in the editorial board of Advanced Energy Materials (Wiley) and Energy & Environmental Science (RSC). From February 2019 to February 2020 she served as associate editor at "Sustainable Energy & Fuels" (Royal Society of Chemistry). Currently she serve as senior editor at "ACS Energy Letters" (American Chemical Society).