Piero Macchi

Piero Macchi will introduce the section

What is Quantum Crystallography

Piero Macchi (b. 1970) obtained a Master of Science in Chemistry (1994) and a PhD in Chemical Science (1999) from the University of Milan. He has been post doc research assistant at the University of Aarhus (1999-2000) with a grant of the DANSYNK (Danish Institute for research with Synchrotron). He returned to the University of Milan as researcher and aggregate professor (2002-2008) and later moved to the University of Bern as group leader of the Chemical Crystallography (2009-2019) where he also obtained the Habilitation in Chemical Crystallography (2009). He later move to the Polytechnic of Milan (2019-2022) as associate professor and was promoted to full professor in 2022. Piero Macchi has been chair of the special interest group on charge, spin and momentum density of the European Crystallographic Association (2011-2014) and of the commission on charge spin and momentum density of the IUCr (2014-2017), later renamed commission on Quantum Crystallography. He has organised two Gordon Conferences on Electron Distribution and Chemical Bonding (2010, 2013), several schools and workshops, the 5th European Charge Density Meeting (2008), the European Crystallographic Meeting (2016), the first edition of the Erice course on quantum crystallography (2018), as well as many national meetings in Switzerland and Italy. He was in the program committee of the IUCr general assembly in 2017. He received the young investigator award from the Italian Crystallographic Association (2002) and the Alajos Kálmán Prize from the Hungarian Chemical Society and the European Crystallographic Association (2024).

His research interests encompasses several areas of crystallography, physical chemistry and inorganic chemistry: chemical bonding analysis in metal complexes and clusters, opto-electronic properties of organic and metal-organic materials, chemical bonding and reactions in solids at high pressure, spintronics materials and quantum computing.