Riccardo Freccero

Short Bio:

Riccardo Freccero received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Chemistry with honors at the University of Genoa, Italy, in 2015 and 2018, respectively. The Ph.D. thesis was performed under the supervision of Prof. Adriana Saccone (University of Genoa) and Dr. Frank R. Wagner (Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Dresden, Germany - MPI-CPfS), focusing on the synthesis, crystal structure determination, and chemical bonding analysis of ternary intermetallic germanides. It was recognized as an "Outstanding Ph.D. Research" by Springer and awarded by the Italian Chemical Society with the Best Thesis Prize 2019. From 2019 to 2021 he was working as a post-doctoral researcher in the ChemBond group of the Chemical Metals Science department, headed by Prof. Yuri Grin, at the MPI-CPfS, and the University of Genoa in the group headed by Prof. Serena De Negri. He is now an Assistant professor at the same institution. His research is focused on binary, ternary, and quaternary intermetallic compounds containing rare earth metals. Particular attention is devoted to the development of new synthetic procedures, to the solution and understanding of their crystal structures, and to the analysis of chemical bonding, applying and extending the most recently introduced quantum chemical techniques in position space techniques. This fundamental research on the chemistry of intermetallics is accompanied by their tests as heterogeneous catalysts, mainly in the Sabatier reaction.