Department About the Department

About the Department

Welcome to the web site of the Department of Chemistry “Ugo Schiff” !

This is a short presentation of useful information for students looking for graduation in studies dealing with chemistry and for persons interested to know more about the Department research activities.

Resulting from merging of the late Chemistry and Organic Chemistry Departments in the year 2010 and from the recent adhesion of some academic personnel of the late Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, the Department of Chemistry “Ugo Schiff” ranks among the largest University Departments.  Presently, the academic staff consists of more than 90 scientists. They have teaching duties in Bachelor and Master degree courses of several Schools, including the School of Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences, the School of Human Health, the School of Agricultural Sciences and the School of Engineering. Forty persons, including technicians and administrative staff, constitute the essential structural support of the research activities.

The research interests are distributed over a fairly high number of chemical areas such as the following:

•    Structural Chemistry

•    Material Science

•    Biological Chemistry

•    Environmental Chemistry

•    Chemical Nanotechnologies

•    Theoretical and Computational Chemistry  

•    Molecular Spectroscopy

•    Electrochemistry

•    Synthetic Chemistry

•    Supramolecular Chemistry

•    Medicinal Chemistry / Drug Design and Synthesis

•    Chemistry applied to Cultural Heritage

•    Polymer Chemistry

•    Green Chemistry

The Chemistry Department is equipped with modern laboratory and computational instrumentation and up-to-date experimental apparatus. The combination of expertise and scientific knowledge makes the Chemistry Department a center of excellence of the University of Florence. Due to this, a high number of graduating students and of the so-called “chemists in preparation”, i.e., Ph.D., post-doc, fellowship students (~ 250 in the year 2012), together with an appreciable amount of foreign visiting students, work under the guidance of the academic staff and obtain significant scientific results.

The CERM, European Centre for Magnetic Resonance, and the CRIST, University Service Centre for Structural Crystallography, refer for administrative purposes to the Chemistry Department “Ugo Schiff”.

The Chemistry Department runs three Doctorate Schools of the University of Florence, the Doctorate in Chemical Sciences, the Doctorate in Science for Cultural Heritage Conservation and the International Doctorate in Mechanistic and Structural Systems Biology. For these doctorates the Department relies on grants whose number is usually much more than the average of the University doctorates.

Academics of the Chemistry Department have been acknowledged with national and international awards during the last years, thus attesting the high quality of the scientific results obtained in this Department.