Name: Lorenzo Mosca
URI Title: Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Email: lorenzo@uri.edu
Pronouns: he/him and they/them
Three adjectives they’d use to describe themself: resourceful, imaginative, friendly

Our new assistant professor of chemistry, Lorenzo Mosca, earned his PhD from the University of Pavia in Northern Italy in 2010. His dissertation focused on the recognition of anions (atoms and molecules with a negative charge) using hydrogen bond and metal-anion interactions. After moving to the United States, he worked at Bowling Green State University and later at Northwestern University. “URI is the perfect cocktail of people and resources where my teaching, my research, and my intellectual independence can thrive,” he says of his move to Rhode Island.

“I have one common thread connecting my research and it is the use of light as an instruction, information, and/or answer. I plan to study complex reaction networks, an environment where many different chemical reactions are happening at the same time, giving a mixture of starting materials, intermediates and products that is interconnected, at any point in time, to the initial conditions and ongoing stimuli (including light) that are supplied to that environment,” they say of the research projects they’re looking forward to developing at URI. “We can envision using this knowledge to develop new smart materials for drug delivery, self-healing and fully recyclable polymers, and smart sensors.” As for other projects in the works, they note: “We desperately need methods for oxidizing molecules that are less of an environmental burden. I will focus research efforts on developing new methods that involve visible light and oxygen, taken from the air, to oxidize hydrocarbons into useful chemicals for the material and pharmaceutical industry in the cleanest way possible. Eventually, we might be able to take a byproduct of the corn syrup industry and make useful molecules with it, thus completing the circle by using renewable resources.”

When not in the classroom, Lorenzo enjoys cooking (risotto is his specialty!), making pottery and soap from scratch, reading science-fiction books, and astronomy. But if you’re interested in being in his classroom this fall, you can find him teaching CHM 291: Organic Chemistry. “It’s very exciting because it’s the first course in the organic chemistry sequence for chemistry majors,” he says. “Organic chemistry is like learning a new language, and I get to be the student’s first interpreter/translator!” His excitement for organic chemistry is connected to how he values the liberal arts as a vehicle for discovery and analysis, where knowledge is built not by simply collecting information but by making connections and observing relationships and studying their evolution and changes. “Everything is interconnected,” he says. “A liberal arts education gives this incredible advantage to the students, and I want to bring that one step into the future by implementing systems thinking into my teaching, and eventually developing a specific course in systems thinking and systems chemistry.”