Massimiliano Arca was born in Cagliari (Italy) in 1969. He graduated summa cum laude in Chemistry at the University of Cagliari in 1994. He joined the Faculty of Science of the University of Cagliari in July 1997 as a permanent Researcher of General and Inorganic Chemistry. He gained Ph.D. graduation in 1998 under the supervision of Prof. F. A. Devillanova, defending a thesis on new 1,2-dithiolene metal complexes with a high degree of pi-electron delocalization. In 2002 he has been an academic visitor at the laboratories of Prof. C. D. Garner and Dr. M. W. George in the Chemistry Department of the University of Nottingham. In 2014 he was called as Associate Professor and in 2019 as Full Professor by the Department of Chemical and Geological Sciences of the University of Cagliari. He has been vice-head of the Department between 2016 and 2018. For the Faculty of Science of the University of Cagliari, he is Erasmus coordinator and responsible for the Computational Chemistry Laboratory. His research interests are focussed 1) on the synthesis and characterization of new substrates rich in nitrogen, sulfur and selenium as donors towards transition metal ions, dihalogens and interhalogenic compounds; 2) the application of computational methods for the design of novel compounds and the interpretation of their spectroscopic, electrochemical, and structural features. The new compounds have been exploited as materials for ICT, antimicrobials, antitumor drugs, and as reinforcement, conservation, and restoration compounds for stone substrate of historical and archaeological interest. He is author of the programmes Specpeak for the decomposition of spectral data into their component Gaussian peaks and GaussFreq for the analysis of the frequency calculations performed by means of the Gaussian computational package. He is co-author of about 170 publications all edited on international journals (150 of which of Q1 level) and about 100 presentations to Italian and international congresses. His research activity was funded by RAS (Regione Autonoma della Sardegna), the University of Cagliari, INSTM (Istituto Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia dei Materiali), ESF (European Science Foundation), CINECA (Consorzio Interuniversitario del Nord Est Italiano per il Calcolo Automatico), FBS (Fondazione Banco di Sardegna), and CASPUR (Consorzio interuniversitario per le Applicazioni di Supercalcolo Per Università e Ricerca). He serves as a reviewer for journals belonging to the ACS, the RSC, Elsevier, and Wiley, and as an expert for the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR), UIF (Università Italo-Francese), Marsden Fund (New Zealand), and occasionally for single universities. During 2003-2009 he has been member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Inorganic Chemistry and during 2014-2020 to Cogent Chemistry. He currently belongs to the Editorial Boards of Molecules (since 2019), MAYFEB Journal of Chemistry (Canada; since 2016), and American Journal of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials (USA, since 2017). He is member of INSTM and he has been member of the Italian Chemical Society (SCI). He was member of the scientific and organizing committees of the international congresses “HALCHEM International Meeting” (Ala Birdi, Italy, 2002), “HALCHEM II International Meeting” (Sighientu, Italy, 2004) and “HALCHEM V” (S. Margherita di Pula, Italy, 2010) on halogen chemistry. He was member of the organizing committees of the “13th National Congress of Supramolecular Chemistry” (SUPRAMOL 2017; S. Margherita di Pula, Italy, 2017) and of the “14th International Conference on the Chemistry of Selenium and Tellurium” (ICCST-14). He is listed in the Top Italian Scientists repository.

Bibliometric data (source Scopus, 20/07/2021):

H-index: 31

Indexed pubblications : 172

Citations: 3497

Scopus Author ID: 7006912042

Orcid ID: 0000-0002-0058-6406

WoS ResearcherID: S-4037-2019