FONTANA Francesca

Graduated in Chemistry by the Faculty of Sciences of the Università degli Studi di Milano in 1984.
Ph.D. in Industrial Chemistry (1987-1990) by the Department of Chemistry of the Politecnico di Milano.
Post-doctoral stage (1990-1991) by the Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences - National Research Council - Ottawa (Canada).
Researcher by Department of Chemistry of the Politecnico di Milano (1990-1998).
Associate professor of Chemistry by the Faculty of Engineering of the Università degli Studi di Bergamo (1998-2006).
Full professor of Chemistry by the Faculty of Engineering of the Università degli Studi di Bergamo since 2006.
By the end of 2011, 97 papers published on international journals and many participations in international conferences.
Member of INSTM - Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials.
Referee for The Journal of Organic Chemistry.
During Ph.D. and as a researcher by the Politecnico di Milano the research activity concerned the study of the reactivity of organic free-radicals; in particular, the main focus was on the exploitation of polar effects in free radical reactions with the purpose of optimization of yields and selectivity in the oxidative functionalization of pyridines, quinolines and quinones. Such reactions are characterized by the fact that they do not require huge amounts of either metal catalysts or oxidizing agents, but they employ instead simple, cheap and environmentally acceptable organic peroxides, hydrogen peroxide or even molecular oxygen. The mechanism of such reactions was investigated, in order to clarify the factors that mostly affect yields and selectivity and to realize the processes in the mildest conditions. Besides, a wide variety of organic substrates were used as sources of carbon-centred radicals, so as to widen as much as possible the synthetic scope of these reactions.
Since 1994 a particular attention was paid to the problem of free-radical alkane functionalization, a task that was accomplished by the use of peroxides as oxidizing agents with different types of catalyzers, including metalloporphyrins, and of dioxirane. The reaction mechanism was studied in depth and processes were developed that provided access also to an unusual class of compounds, namely mixed peroxides.
Since the year 2000, the research line concerning radical oxidations was developed towards syntheses of industrial interest; this brought to a method for the preparation of cyclopropanecarboxylic acid, an intermediate for the synthesis of pyrethroids, the synthesis of diphenols of interest for polymer manufacturing, the obtainment of silanols from silanes, the application of N-hydroxyphthalimide as a new simple and cheap organic mediator for free-radical oxidations and the realization of the trapping of photochemically generated tertiary benzylic radicals, which allows to synthesize derivatives otherwise very difficult to obtain. In the same period, beside this research lines other activities concerned the study of supramolecular interactions and photochemical degradation of organic matter. Since 2005 the research activity concerned the synthesis of azahelicenes by chemical and photochemical methods and their C- and N- functionalization, metal ion complexation, as well as the study of their optical properties and applications in biochemistry and sensors. Moreover, some work was also devoted to the study of the synthesis and characterization of inorganic oxides for applications in catalysis as well as in the field of fuel cells.