Rate My Professor Allegra Franchino

Franchino received her BSc and MSc degrees at the University of Milan in the Gennari–Pignataro group, complemented by an Erasmus exchange at RWTH Aachen. She completed her PhD at the University of Oxford under Professor Darren J. Dixon from 2013 to 2017, funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD Fellowship. Post-PhD, she held a permanent position at an API-producing TEVA plant near Milan before resuming academic research with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ) in Professor Antonio M. Echavarren's group starting September 2018, pioneering the merger of gold and hydrogen-bond donor catalysis. She subsequently worked at ETH Zurich in Professor Bill Morandi's laboratory on skeletal editing of N-heterocycles and iron-catalyzed amination reactions. Her accolades include the Thieme Chemistry Journals Award in 2025, Wiley SCI Young Researcher Lecture Prize in 2021, and Best Talk Prize at the 28th SCI Postgraduate Symposium in 2017. Key publications encompass "Anthracene Bisurea as a Supramolecular Chloride Receptor for Additive-Free, Broad-Scope Gold(I) Catalysis" (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2026), "Late-stage diversification of indole skeletons through nitrogen atom insertion" (Science, 2022), "Gold-catalyzed synthesis of small rings" (Chem. Rev., 2021), "H-bonded counterion-directed enantioselective Au(I) catalysis" (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2022), and "Catalytic enantio- and diastereoselective Mannich addition of TosMIC to ketimines" (Chem. Eur. J., 2018).