Gianfranco Pacchioni is Full Professor of Materials Chemistry at the University of Milano Bicocca where, from 2013 till 2019, he has been Vice-Rector for Research. He received the degree in Chemistry at the University of Milano (1978) and the Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at the Free University of Berlin (1984). He has been working at the IBM Almaden Research Center in California (1987) and at the Technical University of Munich (1993).

He received various awards including the Nasini Medal (1994) and the Pisani medal (2017) of the Italian Chemical Society, the National Price “Federchimica” (1996), the Alexander von Humboldt Award (2005), the Blaise Pascal Medal of the European Academy of Sciences (2016), the Chini Medal of the Division of Industrial Chemistry (2018). He is Fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (2014), the Academia Europaea (2012), the European Academy of Sciences (2009) and others.

He has been Chairman of the Department of Materials Science at the University of Milano Bicocca (2003-2009); the COST Action “Inorganic oxide surfaces and interfaces” (2006-2010); the Panel PE5 of the European Research Council for the Advanced Grants (2008-2012); the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Division of the Italian Chemical Society (2011-2013); etc. He is Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter published by the Institute of Physics (UK).

He is member of the Scientific Council or of the Board of several national and international institutions (Tronchetti Provera Foundation 2008-now; Consorzio CORIMAV for Advanced Materials 2004-2022; EnergyLab Foundation 2009-2016; Lake Como School for Advanced Studies, 2015-now; KIC Raw Materials 2015-2018; Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 2016-2021).

His main interests are theory and electronic structure of oxides (bulk, surface, thin films, nanostructures), supported metal clusters, materials for catalysis, photocatalysis and energy production. Gianfranco Pacchioni is co-author of about 550 papers with more than 30000 citations (h-index WoS 90; Google Scholar 102) and has given about 500 invited talks at international conferences and research institutions.