Biography
Allegra’s training in homogeneous catalysis, focused on transition metals and bifunctional ligands, started during her degree at the University of Milan (under the guidance of Prof. Cesare Gennari, including an Erasmus semester at RWTH Aachen, and continued during her PhD studies at the University of Oxford with Prof. Darren Dixon (2013–2017).
After a brief stint in industry, in 2018 she joined the Echavarren group at ICIQ, supported by a 3-year MSCA COFUND fellowship. She then spent a year in the Morandi lab at ETH Zurich, working on iron catalysis and amination reactions.
Allegra moved to Durham University in September 2022, and is now Associate Professor there. Her group works on combining transition-metal catalysis, organocatalysis and mechanistic studies for the selective synthesis of added-value compounds. Since joining Durham, she has secured over €2.0m in funding, including a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.
Plenary Lecture
Title: Repurposing H-bond donors for transition metal catalysis
Abstract
