Luisa De Cola is since September 2013 Professor Exceptionnelle at the University of Strasbourg (ISIS) as chair of Supramolecular and Bio-Material Chemistry, and part time scientist at the INT-KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany. Since 2016 she is also Professor of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), and since 2019 Honorary Professor at Tianjin University, China.

She was born in Messina, Italy, where she studied chemistry. After a post-doc in USA she was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Bologna (1990). In 1998 she was appointed Full Professor at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In 2004 she moved to the University of Muenster, Germany.

She is recipients of several awards, the most recent being the ERC advanced grant , IUPAC award as one of the Distinguished Women in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering (2011), the International Prize for Chemistry “L. Tartufari” from Accademia dei Lincei and the Catalan -Sabatier prize from the Spanish Royal Academy of Science in 2015 and the Izatt–Christensen Award in Macrocyclic and Supramolecular

Chemistry and the Prize Anassilaos Arte Cultura Economia e Scienze in 2019. She is one of the 39 selected women chemists, from all times, at the Science Museum of Valencia (Ciutat de les Arts y de les Ciencies), Spain.

She has been Nominated “Chevalier de la Légion d' Honneur” by the President of the French Republic, François Hollande, and she is a member of the German National

Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, of the Akademie der Wissenschaften un der Literatur of Mainz and of the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere.

Her main interests are luminescent and electroluminescent systems and their assemblies, and nano- and porous structures for biomedical applications.

She has published more than 370 papers (H index =77), and filed 38 patents.