Luca Pilia is currently Associate Professor in the field of “Chemical Technology Fundamentals” (SSD CHIM/07) at the University of Cagliari, Italy. Since 2013 he has carried out his didactic and scientific activity at the at the Mechanical, Chemical and Material Engineering Department; he teaches Chemistry at the Faculty of Engineering.

L.P. graduated in Chemistry at the University of Cagliari and took his PhD in Chemistry in 2004 at the same university. The research activity during the PhD was developed in collaboration with the group of Dr. Patrick Cassoux at the “Laboratoire de Chimie de Coordination du CNRS” (Toulouse, France) where he spent 20 months working on multifunctional materials based on transition metal complexes and organic donors. From 2003 to 2010 he was appointed as research assistant at the Department of Inorganic Chemistry, University of Cagliari, and from 2010 to 2012 he was postdoctoral researcher as Marie Curie IEF fellow and EPSRC research assistant at the School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh (U. K.).

L.P. main expertise are related to the synthesis and characterization of ligands with O, N and S as donor atoms, and their complexes with transition metals. The characterization techniques employed by L.P. include FT-IR, FT-Raman and UV-Vis-NIR spectroscopies, spectroelectrochemistry and electrochemistry. He also performs calculations using the density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent DFT methods.

L.P. research interest are focused on the metal complexes mainly of Ni(II), Pd(II), Pt(II) and Fe(II/III) as mono-functional materials and, combined with organic donors, as precursors of multi-functional materials with conducting and magnetic properties. He is also interested in semiconductor metal complexes for field effect transistor applications or showing giant magneto resistance effect for spintronics. The main L.P. interest is related to heteroleptic charge transfer metal complexes showing second order nonlinear optical (NLO) properties. In particular, Nickel-triad complexes with dithiolene and/or diimine as ligands are studied as NLO-chromophores both in solution and dispersed into polymeric thin films, showing high NLO activity

Last update: 21/04/2023