Angelo Albini is currently Emeritus Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Pavia, Italy. A native of Milan, he completed his studies in Chemistry at Pavia in 1972. After postdoctoral work at the Max-Plank Institute for Radiation Chemistry in Muelheim, Germany (1973–1974), he joined the Faculty at Pavia in 1975 as an assistant and then associate (since 1981) professor. He accepted a Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Torino in 1990 and then moved again to Pavia in 1993. He has been Visiting Professor at the Universities of Western Ontario (Canada, 1977–78) and Odense (Denmark, 1983). He is coauthor/editor of five books (among the others, Heterocyclic N-Oxides, CRC, Orlando, 1990; Drugs: Photochemistry and Photostability, RSC, Cambridge, 1998; Handbook of Preparative Photochemistry,Wiley-VCH, 2009), the senior reporter of the Specialist Periodic Reports on Photochemistry since 2008, as well as coauthor of several reviews and research articles.
Mommina Ashaque is an undergraduate student attending Macaulay Honors at Brooklyn College. She is a member of Professor Greer's organic chemistry research group, and is on the pre-medical track majoring in Biology. Her research interests are in flow devices in photochemistry, vascular photodynamic therapy (PDT), and also surgical procedures and approaches to counter the onset of neurological diseases.
Andrea Basso was born in Genova in 1971. He graduated from the Univesity of Genova in 1995 and obtained the PhD degree from the University of Southampton in 2000. He is currently associate professor of organic chemistry at the University of Genova. His main research interests focus on novel synthetic methodologies based on multicomponent reactions, photoinduced and photocatalysed transformations and continuous flow processes.
Sergio M. Bonesi was born in Argentina and obtained his M.Sc. degree from University of Buenos Aires in 1988. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from University of Buenos Aires in 1996, under the supervision of Professor Dr. Rosa Erra Balsells. After a postdoctoral stage under the supervision of Professor Angelo Albini at the University of Pavia, he returned to Argentina and worked with Professor Dr. R. Erra Balsells in the area of photochemistry of heteroaromatic compounds. He is currently Associate Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Department of Organic Chemistry, FCEyN, University of Buenos Aires. His interests are in the areas of photoinduced rearrangement reactions, synthetic photochemistry and steady-state and time-resolved spectroscopies. He is devoted to studying photoreactions in confined media.
Theresa M. Busch, PhD is a professor and Associate Director of the Division of Research, Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests encompass the study of tumor microenvironment as it relates to radiation therapy, including ionizing radiation and nonionizing radiation in the form of photodynamic therapy (PDT). Her lab has characterized how treatment parameters such as fluence rate, together with physiologic characteristics of the tumor microenvironment such as its oxygenation or blood flow, can individually or cooperatively act on radiotherapy response. Through elucidation of how PDT interacts with the tumor microenvironment, the Busch laboratory identifies photophysical, molecular targeted and immunological interventions with translational potential to optimize therapy outcome.
Pietro Capurro was born in Genoa in 1993. He attended the Univesity of Genoa, and received his BSc (2015) and MSc (2017) from the Department of Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry. He is now pursuing a PhD under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Basso within the same institution. His main research interests focus on photoinduced and photocatalysed processes to achieve novel transformations, and developing new synthetic pathways exploiting multicomponent reactions.
Javier Carmona-García graduated in chemistry at University of Murcia (Spain) in 2018. There he carried out his bachelor's thesis, under the supervision of Prof. Adolfo Bastida Pascual and Dr. Javier Cerezo, centred in the study of the mechanisms behind peptide movement in aqueous solution by means of Molecular Dynamics simulations. He is currently studying the European Master on Theoretical Chemistry and Computational Modelling at the Institut de Ciència Molecular, Universitat de València (Spain). His research project, supervised by Dr. Daniel Roca-Sanjuán, is related to the study of the photolytic properties of atmospheric Hg compounds using multiconfigurational methods and the effect of their photochemistry in atmospheric modelling.
Dr. Keith Cengel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Pennsylvania, the Director for the Photodynamic Therapy Program and the Executive Director of the Penn Mesothelioma and Pleural Diseases Program. His clinical practice centers on use of ionizing and non-ionizing (photodynamic therapy) radiation for thoracic and neuroendocrine cancers. His research centers on combining dosimetry, organ system physiology and immune/growth factor signaling to understand, predict and modulate the therapeutic index of radiotherapy.
Stefano Crespi received his Ph.D. in 2017 at the University of Pavia (Italy). He won a two-year fellowship as a Post-Doc in the same University focusing on the study of novel heteroaryl azo photoswitches. He joined the workgroup of Burkhard König at the University of Regensburg, where he studied new scaffolds based on heteroaryl azo dyes and novel photocatalytic transformations. In 2019 he moved to Groningen to work on molecular motors in the group of Ben Feringa as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow. His research interests lie in the combination of reaction design in organic (photo)chemistry with computational models.
Bo-Wen Ding received her Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry supervised by Prof. Ya-Jun Liu at the Beijing Normal University (China) in 2017. Her research interests focus on mechanic insight into the bioluminescence of marine organisms using ab initio methods, QM/MM techniques, and nonadiabatic molecular dynamics simulations.
Andrés M. Durantini studied at the National University of Río Cuarto (UNRC), Argentina, where he received his BSc degree in Chemistry in 2008. In 2013 he obtained his PhD degree in physical organic chemistry and photochemistry involving the study of soft matter. After graduate school, he started a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University, Montreal, Canada; where he gained expertise in organic chemistry and photobiology. His present position is Adjunct Researcher of CONICET at UNRC. His current area of research includes drug design, organic photochemistry and photodynamic inactivation.
Pooria Farahani received his PhD degree from Uppsala University (Sweden), in 2014, for his theoretical chemistry studies on the chemiluminescence processes of 1,2-dioxetane-like systems, under Prof. Roland Lindh and Dr. Marcus Lundberg's supervisions. In 2015, he obtained a grant from the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) to do a postdoctoral research at the University of São Paulo (Brazil), within the experimental group of Prof. Wilhelm Josef Baader, at the Departmento de Química Fundamental, focusing on the application of “quantum-chemical methods to rationalize efficient electronically excited-state formation in chemical transformation”. He is now a member of Theoretical Chemistry & Biology Department of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (Sweden). His recent subject is to study catalytic composites for sustainable synthesis which includes photochemical reactions catalysed by metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).
Antonio Francés-Monerris graduated in pharmacy in 2009 at the University of València (Spain). In 2011, he received a MSc. in organic chemistry at the Polytechnical University of València after a short stay in a pharmaceutical company. He received his PhD in chemistry in 2017 at the University of València for his theoretical studies on radiation damage to DNA/RNA nucleobases using multiconfigurational and DFT-based methods, a work carried out under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Roca-Sanjuán and Prof. Manuela Merchán. Currently, he is a post-doc researcher in the group of Dr. Antonio Monari at the University of Lorraine in Nancy (France). His main research interests span the photoinduced phenomena in DNA/RNA nucleobase clusters, the photosensitization of biological systems, the study of the fluorescence and chemiluminescence phenomena and the photophysics of iron-based metal-organic complexes.
Angelo Giussani graduated in Chemistry in 2008 at the Università degli Studi di Milano. In 2011 he finalized his European MSc in “Theoretical Chemistry and Computational Modelling” at the Universitat de Valencia. In 2014 he received his PhD at the Universitat de Valencia, where he was working in the QCEXVAL group studying aromatic chromophores performing CASPT2//CASSCF calculations. From 2014 until 2016, he moved at the Universita di Bologna where he was involved in the simulation of 2D spectra and in the study of DNA photoreactions using a QM/MM approach. In 2016 he moved as a Marie Curie Fellow in the group of Dr. Graham Worth, were he was performing quantum dynamics simulations using the DD-vMCG method. Since 2018 he moved back at the Universitat de Valencia, working in the MolMatTC and QCEXVAL groups. His main research interest is in the study of photophysical and photochemical phenomena performing both ab-initio and quantum dynamics computations.
Alexander Greer is a professor of chemistry at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the President of the American Society for Photobiology, associate editor of Photochemistry & Photobiology, and co-chair of the Committee of Concerned Scientists. He also cofounded the company Singlet O2 Therapeutics LLC. His research interests are in photochemistry, singlet oxygen, peroxides, and photodynamic therapy.
Dominik Heger has started his career at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic with Petr Klán as an organic synthetic chemist, and soon found a strong affection for physical chemistry and especially photochemistry. He is specialized in (time-resolved) spectroscopic methods used in mechanistic photochemistry and identification of reaction intermediates, and in spectroscopic techniques used to study the chemistry of ice impurities and their interactions. His knowledge and skills lie especially in theoretical and applied photophysics, physics and chemistry of ice, and data treatment. He aims to connect the investigation across such diverse areas as environmental sciences, biochemistry, pharmaceutical sciences, freezing, and lyophilization.
Michele M. Kim completed her bachelor's degree and doctorate degree in physics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a senior medical physics resident in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include dosimetry in photodynamic therapy, small animal irradiation with photons and protons, and dosimetry for proton flash radiation studies. Her experience includes research with small animals both in mathematical modeling of the biological processes during photodynamic therapy and device development for translational applications.
Petr Klán received an M.S. degree from Masaryk University, Brno, the Czech Republic in 1986. After working in the industry for five years, he pursued his Ph.D. at Michigan State University under the tutelage of Prof. Peter J. Wagner. After receiving his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1998, he joined the faculty at Masaryk University where he is now a full professor. His current research focuses on photochemistry, mechanisms of organic reactions, kinetic studies by flash photolysis, spectroscopy, photoremovable protecting groups, and environmental photochemistry. He is a co-author of “Photochemistry of Organic Compounds: From Concepts to Practice” (Wiley, 2009) with Prof. Jakob Wirz.
Ya-Jun Liu received his Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry at the University of Science and Technology of China, in 2002. After a postdoctoral period at Uppsala University (Sweden) with Prof. Sten Lunell and at Lund University (Sweden) with Profs. Björn O. Roos and Roland Lindh, he returned to China in 2006 to Beijing Normal University and was promoted to professor in 2012 at the same university where he has remained ever since. Most of his scientific work has been devoted to the theoretical study of photochemistry. In recent years, his research has focused on bioluminescence and chemiluminescence.
David C. Magri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Malta. He is a graduate of Western University in London, Ontario, Canada (organic electrochemistry and photochemistry), and is a former Research Fellow of Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland (molecular logic gates). After spending four years lecturing in Canada, he moved to Malta to begin an independent research program embracing molecular logic-based computation and supramolecular chemistry. His scientific contributions include the invention of the ‘lab-on-a-molecule' and the ‘Pourbaix sensor’. In 2019, these contributions were recognised by a Malta Science Innovation Award.
Kazuhiko Mizuno was born in Osaka, Japan in 1947 and obtained his PhD degree in 1976 at Osaka University. He began his academic career at Osaka Prefecture University and was promoted to full professor in 1996 and retired in 2012. He became Professor Emeritus. He joined as an adjunct professor at Nara Institute of Science and Technology (2012–2019). He was Secretary of the Asian and Oceanian Photochemistry Association (APA) (2004–2008) and President of the Japanese Photochemistry Association (JPA) (2008–2009). He has received Progress Award in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, Japan (1986), the JPA Award (1996), and Award for Distinguished Achievements to APA (2012). His current research interests focuses on photoinduced electron transfer chemistry and microflow photochemistry.
Dr. Prabhu Mohapatra received PhD in Chemistry from Delhi University and worked as a Research Associate at Ranbaxy Research Laboratories, India. Subsequently, Dr. Mohapatra moved to the USA and conducted postdoctoral studies at the University of Akron, University of Florida, Acadia University, Augusta University, and Brooklyn College (The City University of New York). He has coauthored more than 45 papers in various peer-reviewed journals. He has been awarded with six US patents in Medicinal Chemistry while working as a Scientist, Medicinal Chemistry at Reviva Pharmaceuticals. Currently, Dr. Mohapatra serves as a Program Manager III at Maryland Department of Human Services in an IT Modernization Project, Maryland's Total Human-services Integrated Network or MD THINK. Dr. Mohapatra has been a Freelance Editor in Science and Technology fields since 2011.
Antonio Monari received his Ph.D. from the University of Bologna, Italy and is presently associate professor at the LPCT department of the University of Lorraine and CNRS in Nancy, France. His main scientific interests are the development and use of multiscale methods, including QM/MM and non-adiabatic dynamics, to study photophysical and photochemical phenomena taking place in complex environments. He is also interested in describing the structural and dynamical behaviour of complex biological architectures submitted to external stress sources via enhanced sampling molecular dynamics and free energy techniques. He particularly tackles DNA photolesions induction and repair, the photosensitization of other biological systems, such as vision related proteins, and the photophysics of organometallic compounds. Antonio Monari is author of about 150 publications and is member of the executive committee of the French Society of Photobiology, and of the CNRS Comité National for the physical chemistry and numerical methods in biology sections.
Miriam Navarrete-Miguel graduated in chemistry at the University of Valencia in 2017. Then, she studied the European Master on Theoretical Chemistry and Computational Modelling at the Institut de Ciència Molecular, Universitat de València (Spain) supervised by Dr. Daniel Roca-Sanjuán and receiving the diploma in 2019. She is currently doing a joint theoretical and experimental PhD in the QCEXVAL group on the study of the photochemical mechanisms of DNA damage and repair.
Julia Pérez-Prieto has been Full Professor and Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Valencia since 2007 and is the leader of the Photochemical Reactivity Group at the Molecular Science Institute (ICMol) of the University of Valencia. She has authored over 175 papers, published in prestigious, high impact, peer-reviewed journals in the field of photochemistry, chemical reactivity, and nanomaterials. Her research interests are currently focused on the design and synthesis of new photoactive materials for application in sensing, photocatalysis, bioimaging, singlet oxygen generation, emissive devices, among others.
Uwe Pischel (1973, Germany) is a Full Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Huelva (UHU). He studied Chemistry at the Technical University Dresden and the Humboldt-University Berlin and obtained his PhD in Photochemistry at the University of Basel in 2001, working with Prof. W. M. Nau. Afterwards he spent time as postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof. M. A. Miranda at the Polytechnical University Valencia. He has been a Ramón y Cajal Fellow between 2006 and 2009. His research interests focus on the chemistry of molecular switches, supramolecular (photo)chemistry, and the development of new fluorophores. He has published more than 100 articles in these fields and is the recipient of the Albert-Weller Prize (2003) and the Grammaticakis-Neumann Award (2013).
Stefano Protti (born in 1979) completed his PhD in Pavia (2007, supervisor: Prof. Maurizio Fagnoni) focusing on photochemical arylations via phenyl cations. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the LASIR laboratory (Lille, France) and at the iBitTec-S Laboratory (CEA Saclay, France). He is currently Associate Professor at the University of Pavia, Italy. Stefano Protti is currently a co-author of more than 100 research articles and reviews, 15 chapters in multi-authored books and the book Paradigms in Green Chemistry and Technology, (2016, Springer IK, with Angelo Albini). His research is mainly focused on the development and the optimization of photochemical arylation processes under ecosustainable conditions.
Matías I. Quindt was born in Paraná, Entre Ríos, Argentina and he obtained his M.Sc. in Chemistry from the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe 2016. In 2017, he began his PhD studies with funding form a doctoral scholarship of the Argentinean National Research Council (CONICET) under the supervision of Professor Dr. Sergio M. Bonesi at the University of Buenos Aires. His main research interests are related to the study of the photo-Fries rearrangement reaction of steroidal compounds in homogeneous and heterogeneous media.
Carlotta Raviola (born in 1988) studied chemistry at the University of Pavia where she graduated in 2011. She received her PhD degree from the same University in 2015 (Prof. A. Albini as the supervisor) and spent part of this period at the Technische Universität München (Germany) in the group of Prof. Thorsten Bach. She is currently a post-doc at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Pavia and her research interests focus on the photoinduced or photocatalytic generation of highly reactive species (aryl cations, (bi)radical intermediates) for synthethic applications.
Elzbieta Regulska received her PhD (summa cum laude) in Chemistry in 2015 from the University of Bialystok (Poland). During her PhD she did internships in the groups of Prof. D. Guldi (Germany) and Prof. L. Echegoyen (USA). In 2016 she became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at El Paso (USA), and in 2017 she continued her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Heidelberg (Germany). She was PI of PRELUDIUM, ETIUDA and BMN Grants. Currently, her research focuses on the synthesis and physicochemical investigations of novel organophosphorus materials in the group of Prof. C. Romero-Nieto.
Patricia Remón (1982, Spain) is an Assistant Professor in Organic Chemistry at the University of Huelva (UHU). She studied Pharmacy at the University of Seville and defended her PhD thesis in Organic Chemistry in 2014 which was focused on molecular switches for mimicking logic operations. She spent time as postdoctoral researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, working with Prof. J. Andréasson from 2014 to 2016. Nowadays her research is focused on supramolecular (photo)chemistry.
Daniel Roca-Sanjuán received his Ph.D. degree in 2009 for his quantum-chemistry studies on DNA photochemistry carried out at the Quantum Chemistry of the Excited State (QCEXVAL) group of Profs. Manuela Merchán and Luis Serrano-Andrés, Institut de Ciència Molecular, Universitat de València (Spain). In 2010, he moved to the group of Prof. Roland Lindh at the Department of Chemistry–Ångström, Uppsala University (Sweden), with a Marie Curie postdoctoral grant, where he researched on the development and application of quantum-chemical methods with the MOLCAS program to the bioluminescence and chemiluminescence phenomena. In 2013, he returned to the QCEXVAL group as a postdoctoral “Juan de la Cierva” fellow and since 2017 he is working as a “Ramón y Cajal” fellow (tenure track researcher) on computational photochemistry and chemiluminescence.
Carlos Romero-Nieto received his PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). During his PhD studies, he joined in 2008 the group of Prof. Dr. T. Baumgartner at the University of Calgary (Canada) for one year. In 2010, he joined the group of Prof. Dr. D. Guldi as postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Physical Chemistry of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany). In 2013, he started his independent career as Liebig Fellow at the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and in 2019 he obtained the German Habilitation (Venia Legendi) in Organic Chemistry. Currently at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, his scientific contributions have been recognized with diverse awards including the Hengstberger Award for Young Researchers from the University of Heidelberg in 2016, the National Prize for Young Researchers from the Royal Spanish Chemical Society in 2018 and the Prize for Young Chemists from the Royal Spanish Chemical Society of Castilla-La Mancha in 2020. His research interests involve the synthesis of novel phosphorus- and boron-based functional molecules for the development of new materials and bio-applications.
Javier Segarra-Martí received his PhD degree at the Instituto de Ciencia Molecular, Univeristy of Valencia (Spain) in 2014 under the supervision of Prof. Merchán and Dr. Roca-Sanjuán. He then worked at the University of Bologna (Italy) and the École Normale Supèrieure de Lyon (France) in QM/MM excited state processes and DNA photo-sensitisation monitored with non-linear spectroscopies. He was then a Marie Curie Fellow in the group of Profs. Bearpark and Robb FRS at Chemistry, Imperial College London (UK), and has recently returned to the Instituto de Ciencia Molecular, University of Valencia (Spain) where he is a GenT fellow.
Nadja Simeth studied chemistry at the University of Regensburg, Germany, with an internship at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She pursued her doctorate studies with Burkhard König at the University of Regensburg. After a short research stay with Maurizio Fagnoni at the University of Pavia in 2017, she defended her thesis in summer 2018 with summa cum laude. Currently, she is working as a postdoc in the group of Ben Feringa at the University of Groningen supported by a Feodor-Lynen Fellowship of the Humboldt Foundation. She is interested in the design of smart drugs, biochemical probes and photoresponsive supramolecular architecture.
Takashi Tsuno obtained his PhDs at the University of Shizuoka under the supervision of Prof. Dr. M. Sato in 2005 and at the University of Regensburg under the supervision of Prof. Dr. H. Brunner in 2007. Currently, He is a professor at Nihon University and has also been a contributor to SPR, Photochemistry, since 2009.
Michael Zatoulovski received a B.A. degree in chemistry from Brooklyn College of CUNY. He joined the laboratory of Prof. A. Greer at Brooklyn College of CUNY. His research interests are in organic peroxides and polyoxides, including hydrotrioxides, and on the sensitization and photobleaching of molecules on solid surfaces.
Timothy C. Zhu received his PhD in 1991 in physics from Brown University. He is currently a professor in the department of radiation oncology at the University of Pennsylvania. His current research interests include explicit PDT dosimetry, reactive oxygen species explicit dosimetry (ROSED), integrated system for interstitial and intracavitory PDT, diffuse optical tomography, in vivo dosimetry, and external beam radiation transport.
