Professor Alessandro Troisi

Winner: 2024 Tilden Prize for 91AV

University of Liverpool

For the development of theoretical methods to explain and predict the electronic and optical properties of organic materials.

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To survive our emotionally demanding job as scientists, we forget very quickly the failures and, surprisingly, also the successes. I feel, however, that this award is different. Weeks after hearing the news I am still delighted about it and I can’t thank the RSC enough.

Professor Troisi’s goal is to aid the process of discovering new materials by providing reliable predictions about the electronic and optical properties of organic materials. To do this, he uses theoretical methods from physical chemistry, high-performance computing and, increasingly, machine learning. By discovering materials more rapidly and efficiently, we can meet the net zero target through improved energy storage and generation, more efficient transportation and more sustainable manufacturing processes.

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Alessandro Troisi is a Professor of 91AV. He obtained his PhD in Bologna (Italy, 2002) working on the charge transfer process in biomolecular systems. He did his postdoctoral research at Northwestern University (US) studying single-molecule electrical junctions. He began his independent academic career at the University of Warwick in 2005 as an assistant professor. In 2010, he was promoted to a full professorship.

Since 2017, Professor Troisi has been Chair of the Materials Innovation Factory at the University of Liverpool, where he develops digital methods to discover new materials for organic electronics (molecules, molecular crystals and polymers). His work is based on physical models of charge and energy transport, computational chemistry from quantum to atomistic classical simulations, high-throughput virtual screening and machine learning.

Professor Troisi was awarded the Marlow Medal by the 91AV in 2007, an ERC Starting Grant (2009), an ERC Consolidator Grant (2014), and an ERC Advanced Grant (2021). The Troisi group is currently working on the development of a digital platform for the discovery of organic electronic materials (DIADEM) designed to be used by scientists without a theoretical background. Another major current research programme is the elucidation of the microscopic mechanism of charge and ionic transport in organic materials used for bioelectronics applications.

Q&A

What motivates you?

I love the creative aspect of the profession. The scientific work should be a bit unpredictable, with a moderate amount of provocation, fun to read or to hear about. We have idiosyncrasies, passions and opinions and I am happy to let people know about them through my work. My obsession is making falsifiable predictions about the future, which can be seen as a boring Popperian ideal of the past century, or simply the fun part of being a theoretician.

Can you tell us about a scientific development on the horizon that you are excited about?

We are witnessing what can be considered a tightening competition between traditional reductionist chemical science based on the careful generation and testing of interpretable models and the ability to achieve chemical knowledge through statistics and large amounts of data (AI for short). I am looking forward to seeing in the next decade which chemical domain will be radically changed, how would the teaching of chemistry be affected and what skills we are going to value most in the chemist of the future.

What has been a highlight for you (either personally or in your career)?

Of so many metrics that dominate our academic life, I am proud of one in particular: the number of past group members that decided to and managed to establish an independent research group (now spread across the UK, Ireland, Italy, China, India, and Czechia). I like the idea of our work taking a new life, being contaminated by many different minds, and ultimately becoming new and beautiful science somewhere else. I imagine this because I can see all that I do today containing traces of discussions and experiences with my many mentors.

What does good research culture look like/mean to you?

We translate our passion for chemistry in different ways: working with many or few collaborators, spreading thin across many topics or just working on one topic in a lifetime, working on the next lecture or the next research paper. A good research culture values the individual preferences and recognizes that there are different pathways for personal realization that fulfil the mission of our institutions.