Biografie

Luisa Torsi is full professor of chemistry at the University of Bari and adjunct professor at the Abo Academy University in Finland. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics and a PhD in Chemistry from UNIBA and was a post-doc at Bell Labs in the United States. In 2010 Torsi was awarded the H.E. Merck by the renown multinational and is the first woman to have received this prestigious international recognition. In 2019 she was awarded the Distinguished Women Award by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry-IUPAC. She was also the only female president of the European Material Research Society which, with more than 4,000 members, is the largest in its category in Europe. Prof. Luisa Torsi is the winner of the Wilhelm Exner Medal 2021 (https://www.wilhelmexner.org/en/). The medal has been awarded since 1921 by the Austrian Association for SME to celebrate excellence in research and science. Her research is centered on transistor bio-electronic systems capable of detecting a single protein marker or a single virus in real, non-pretreated samples of blood or saliva. The electronic detecting interface, can be manufactured with low-cost technologies, has a dimension orders of magnitude larger than the single protein to be detected. This is a world record based on the Single-Molecule with a large Transistor -SiMoT technology patented by Torsi and her group in 2018. The prospect is the development of ultra-sensitive, fast (15 minutes), low-cost and highly-reliable diagnostic systems for ultra-early screening of progressive diseases such as tumors as well as viral and bacterial infections. Torsi is the author of over 220 articles, also published in high-impact journals such as Science and Nature. Her works have collected more than 15,000 citations contributing to reaching an h-index of 59 (google scholar). Research funding raised for over € 26 million, includes several national and European projects, of which Torsi is often the coordinator. Luisa Torsi is also committed as a role model for young female scientists. In a recent campaign by the Bracco Foundation, she starred in a story of TOPOLINO (the Italian digest-size version of the Disney comics) in the role of Louise Torduck, a successful scientist from Calisota Valley.