Sara MENINNO | Curriculum

Sara Meninno is Assistant Professor of Organic Chemistry (RTD-B-CHIM/06) at the Department of Chemistry and Biology at University of Salerno since February 1, 2022.

She graduated in 2011 with honours (110 cum laude) and obtained her Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2015 from University of Salerno under the supervision of prof. Lattanzi, defending a thesis entitled "Chiral organocatalysts mediated asymmetric oxyfunctionalization and tandem reactions".

As a post-doctoral fellow, she worked on the development of new organocatalyzed one-pot and tandem methodologies as efficient tools to access chiral heterocycles, potentially useful as synthetic intermediates or bioactive compounds.

In 2018, she was awarded by Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei a Royal Society of Chemistry fellowship to spend in the UK. She joined prof. Rios’ group at Southampton University to work on synergistic catalysis.

From August 2019 to January 2022 she was Research Fellow (fixed-termed researcher RTD-A) at the Department of Chemistry and Biology of Salerno University.

In July 2020, she obtained the National Scientific Qualification (ASN) as Associate Professor (SC 03/C1- Organic Chemistry).

Her research interests include the design and realization of green organocatalyzed protocols with low environmental and energetic impact for the synthesis of new interesting scaffolds and the transformation of renewable materials derived from biomass into value-added compounds.

She published 48 scientific papers, including several invited articles, in international peer-reviewed journals, achieving H-index = 18 and 918 citations from the scientific production (January 2024, detected by the international database "Scopus"). As an expert in organocatalysis, she is also co-author of 4 invited book chapters, one for the RSC Green Chemistry Sustainable Catalysis without Metals or Other Endangered Elements and she contributed with several papers to Invited Special Issues: “Women in Chemistry”, “Women in Catalysis”, “Women of Catalysis” and “Green Chemistry Themed Issue: Elemental Sustainability”, “Bifunctional Catalysis”.

AWARDS:

July 2021 - Junior Research Award "Organic Chemistry for the Environment, Energy and Nanosciences" by the Italian Chemical Society (Division of Organic Chemistry), for her contributions to the development of new stereoselective methods, with low environmental impact, for the synthesis of heterocyclic compounds of biological interest, by usign organocatalysts deriving from renewable feedstocks.

Since December 2023, he has been the Principal Investigator under 40 of a PRIN PNRR 2022 project (Project Code: P2022MWY3P) lasting 24 months aimed at synthesizing pharmacologically active molecules against age-related diseases.