ARNABOLDI SERENA

Since the beginning of my PhD studies my research was dedicated to chiral electrochemistry, including enantioselective electroanalysis and enantioselective electrosynthesis, a quite unexplored area, but with a huge applicative potential yet to be studied. Considering that chirality can make electrochemical processes smarter and applicable to issues of much higher added value I focused my attention on the characterization of new classes of inherently chiral materials. Inherent chirality is an intrinsic property of a molecule, propagating in the 2D and 3D space, conferring specific characteristic to the resulting material obtained after depositing it on an electrode surface or after adding it as a chiral additive in a solution. Employing such molecules in enantioselective analysis, I obtained for the first time a separation between the enantiomers of chiral probes (even drugs in complex matrix) in terms of peak potential values, testing also racemic mixtures of the enantiomers, evaluating the enantiomeric excesses. Starting from this point, by the optimization of the set-ups and the experimental conditions, several inherently chiral compounds were synthetized with chemically different atropoisomeric scaffold and stereogenic elements, and characterized to be exploited in different fields (i.e. chiral electroanalysis, spintronics, bipolar electrochemistry). This work gave me the opportunity to establish several national and international collaborations. After brief internships in the laboratories of Professor Sabine Ludwigs, an expert in conducting polymers at University of Stuttgart, where I gained expertise in solid-state electrochemical characterization methods (in-situ electrochemical-conductance and spectroelectrochemical techniques), and in the ones of Doctor Roberto Cirilli at Instituto Superiore di Sanità, where I learnt chiral HPLC techniques; I went for a period of six month as a visiting scientist from Università degli Studi di Milano to the laboratories of Professor Alexander Kuhn at University of Bordeaux, France. Here I started to study bipolar electrochemistry using inherently chiral compounds for developing on-off sensors able to absolutely discriminate the enantiomers of chiral analytes present in a solution. After the promising results and the correspondent publications (one in Analytical Chemistry and one in Chemistry of Materials), I was hired as a postdoctoral researcher of one year by Professor A. Kuhn. In this period, I developed a new type of self-propelled microswimmer, constituted by inherently chiral compounds, in which the trajectories are influenced by the diastereomeric interactions between the oligomeric compounds and chiral probes in solutions, a successful approach published in Nature Chemistry. This last work was particularly inspirational for my future achievements including the ERC StG Project “CHEIR” just started in June 2022, in which I am the principal investigator (five postdoctoral fellowships, master and bachelor students). The project regards essentially chiral cargo-towing systems for transporting chiral analytes through biological fluids. These objects are triggered by the synergy between chirality, bipolar electrochemistry and magnetic field.The collaboration with the group of Professor Kuhn was so fruitful that we decided to extent it for five additional years, planning to extend different concepts beyond the ERC project, concerning enzymatic actuators, valves for microfluidics and synthetic swimmers. I have shown my work in form of oral presentation at many conferences (39), even as an invited speaker in Seville during the 6th Euchems Chemistry Congress, in Sestriere in the frame of the Congress GEI 2018 and in seminars at the University of Rennes, University of Bordeaux and University of Stuttgart. I was recently invited in Warsaw to give a Dream Chemistry Lecture dedicated to excellent science carried out by promising researchers at an early career stage. I was awarded several different prizes e.g. International Dropsens Award for the best research work in applied electroanalytical chemistry, Bath, UK. All my results were published in high impact factor journals like i.e. Chemical Science, Angewandte Chemie and Nature Chemistry. Moreover, I am co-author of 52 publications in international peer-reviewed journals (20 as first author and 10 as a corresponding author), with a total citation number of 762 and with an h-index of 15 (source: Scopus). The independence of my research is well demonstrated because I am an ERC StG grantee leading a research group with different postdoctoral researchers and master/bachelor students. In addition, I wrote several reviews, focused on different topics ranging from chiral conventional and unconventional electrochemistry to bipolar electrochemistry of conducting polymers, which reflects my multidisciplinary background. I am currently a Researcher at the Department of Chemistry, University of Milano and since the 1st of November 2022 I am Associate Professor in the same University.