The Organic Division of the Italian Chemical Society (SCI) has awarded Dr. Allegra Franchino with the 2021 SCI Young Researcher Lecture prize for her contribution to the upcoming SCI plenary congress. “This prize is a big encouragement to keep going on with my research, it means that the work that my coworkers and I have performed has been appreciated by the community,” states Franchino, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie PROBIST postdoctoral researcher in the Echavarren group.

Two SCI Young Researcher Lecture prizes were sponsored by Wiley: one organic, another inorganic. The two SCI Young Researcher awardees were selected among all the participants to the SCI Plenary Congress who submitted an abstract of their work and are under 35 years old. Each awardee will receive a 500€ prize and the invitation to submit a contribution to a journal: the European Journal of Organic Chemistry and the European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry respectively.

As acknowledgement for her award, Franchino will also deliver the opening lecture of the Organometallic Session of the 2021 SCI plenary congress. Her talk will focus on gold catalysis and a new approach the researchers have devised to solve remaining challenges in this field, with the help of organocatalysis. “This will be great exposure, as the work I’ll present pretty much sums up all the postdoctoral research I’ve done in the last three years here at ICIQ. Prof. Echavarren gave me a lot of freedom to explore the chemistry, mentor my younger coworkers and take responsibility for it,” thanks Franchino, who will join the Morandi group at ETH Zurich as a postdoctoral researcher in October.