Francesca Pignatelli

Francesca Pignatelli is senior technician at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology, IIT) where since October 2014 she is technical manager of the Center for Materials Interfaces labs (Pontedera, Italy). She graduated in Physics in 1999, at the University of Florence in Italy, studing “Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling in Josephson Junctions”. From 2000 to 2004 she accomplished her PhD studies in Physics, at the “Physikalisches Institüt III der Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg” in Germany, in Prof. A. V. Ustinov’s group, over a EC predoc in the European Commission research and training network, LocNet . She obtained her PhD in January 2004 with a work on “Broken-Symmetry States in Josephson Cells”. In 2004-2006 she worked at the “Laboratorio di Sanità Pubblica” ASL 10 of Florence, as responsible for the definition of the sampling strategies and of the general evaluation of the results for the physical risk factors, in the regional project Indoor, investigation of the school environments. Since 2006 she joined IIT, working first on the set-up and development of the nanophysics facility of IIT central research laboratories in Genova, Italy, then in the Smart Material group of the department of nanophysics under the supervision of A. Athanassiou, working on the optimization and study of “smart” materials by them structural, thermal and optical characterization. Her specific research experience ranges from superconductivity, Josephson tunnel junctions and Josephson junctions arrays as model systems for studying localized excitations in nonlinear lattices to polymeric nanocomposites-development & characterization. In this last activity her field of interest is the tailoring of material properties such as optical, electrical, superficial and thermal, with particular care to the assembly of the nanofillers in the polymeric matrix.