Fabio is from Ferrara in Emilia Romagna in the north of Italy. He was awarded his laurea in Chemistry at the University of Ferrara in 2013. During this time he spent a period in Poland as an Erasmus student and he decided that he needed to study abroad. It seems that Fabio likes Poland and has been back on a few occasions including presenting at the Puzzel student conference in Wroclaw, Poland in April 2015. He even collaborated with a Polish group during his degree to produce a paper on peptides found in African viper venom! Nevertheless, he wanted to come to the UK and made enquiries about working in Sheffield, before being offered a project (starting October 2013) working with Richard Jones and co-supervised by me. Richard was very keen to have someone working on the material properties of the semiconducting polymer PCDTBT. If you really wanted to know, the chemists call this poly[N-9”-hepta-decanyl-2,7-carbazole-alt-5,5-(4’,7'-di-2-thienyl-2’,1’,3'-benzothiadiazole)] but the rest of us have enough problems remembering PCDTBT without struggling with that. Anyway, this gives Fabio access to flashy x-ray experiments, as well as rather more mundane ellipsometry. Fabio’s life is not restricted to the glamour of Sheffield. In 2015 he spent a chunk of the summer in Honduras working as a research assistant preparing biodiversity surveys for Operation Wallacea. Fabio’s home town of Ferrara is not too far from Modena where I was having a well-earned sabbatical in 2016 so I went to visit him when he went to see his family in Italy. The photo above was taken during this visit and made it clear why he had to come to Sheffield, where umbrellas have a less decorative and much more practical use. On February 9, 2018 Fabio spent a few hours chatting about his work before his examiners, Professors Hazel Assender (University of Oxford) and Patrick Fairclough (University of Sheffield), and a few corrections later, Fabio now has his doctorate! Armed with a PhD, Fabio left for Scotland to work as a research scientist before moving to Huntsman near Bruxelles, where he is a Senior Research Scientist.
Oral presentations:
Polymer Physics Group Biennial Meeting, Manchester, September 2015
Scattering Methods Applied to Soft Condensed Matter, Gironde, France, May 2014