Matteo Mauro was born on November 27th 1983 and since October 2012 has been appointed as Assistant Professor at the Institut de Science et d'Ingénierie Supramoléculaires (I.S.I.S.), Université de Strasbourg. In 2014, he has been awarded the Habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) from the same university.

He began to study Chemistry at University of Bari (Italy) in 2001, where he obtained his B.Sc. cum laude in 2004, defending a thesis in organometallic chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Michele Aresta. Afterwards, he moved to University of Milano (Italy), where in 2004 got his M.Sc. degree in Chemical Sciences under the supervision of Prof. Giuseppe D’Alfonso. In the same research group, he obtained his Ph.D. degree in Chemical Sciences in 2009. During his Ph.D. he spent a six-month internship at Ciba/BASF, in Basel (Switzerland), in the research group, led by Dr. Andreas Hafner. He continued and completed the project in Prof. Luisa De Cola’s research group, in Münster (Germany). For his doctoral work, he was awarded the Eni Award 2010, “debut research prize”. In Feb 2010, he came back to Münster for one-year postdoc working in the frame of the BMBF project titled “So-Light”. In April 2011 he was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität and at the Center for Nanotechnology in Münster (Germany) in the group of Prof. Luisa De Cola.

His research focuses on design, synthesis, photophysical and theoretical characterization of self-assembling luminescent materials based on transition metal complexes and their application in optoelectronic devices and bioimaging. The current main goal of his research is to explore, by means of buttom-up approach, the possibility to control long-range ordered nano- and micro-meter scale supramolecular structures based on organometallic functional materials, displaying enhanced photophysical and biological properties with respect to the bulk (non-assembled) counterparts.

Honors

2013 – University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study (USIAS) Fellow 

2011 – Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow (18 months)

2010 – ENI Award, Debut in Research prize

2008 – Fellowship in applied research for an internship in Research Group, Corporate Technology, Ciba Specialty Chemicals, Basel (CH)

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My research has therefore focused on four main subjects:

i) the synthesis, photophysical and theoretical characterization (DFT and TD-DFT level) of rhenium(I)-based dinuclear organometallic systems as component of highly-efficient electroluminescent OLEDs;

Figure 1. Isodensity surface plots of some relevant molecular orbitals of [Re₂(m-Cl)₂(CO)₆(m-pydz]

ii) the creation, using luminescent and redox active components, of a new class of crystalline porous materials able to modulate their properties upon insertion of molecules inside their pores. These systems are based on cyclometallated iridium(III) double-complex salts;

Figure 2. a) crystal packing of one of the double-complex salts, four unit cells are represented and for clarity all the solvent molecules eliminated. The picture highlights the channels running along the c axis; b) enlarged representation of one unit cell; c) enlarged representation of one unit cell, the solvent dichloromethane molecules inside the channels and pockets are highlighted in space-filling.

iii) design, synthesis and theoretical characterization of electro-luminescent materials based on highly emitting neutral platinum and (deep)-blue-emitting iridium complexes.

iv) synthesis of luminescent metal complexes (metallo-surfactants) which can self-assemble in solution to form aggregates of different shapes and sizes.

Figure 3. Pictorial representation of the self-assembling of SDS-like luminescent iridium(III) metallosurfactants and picture of the aggregated compound in water, under UV-light irradiation.