Laura Gagliardi is an Italian theoretical and computational chemist and Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota. She is known for her work on the development of electronic structure methods and their use for understanding complex chemical systems.
Education
Gagliardi earned her Master of Science degree in chemistry at the University of Bologna in 1992 for which she was awarded 'Toso Montanari' for the student with the highest-mark graduation in chemistry. She earned her PhD at the same university in 1997. She was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Cambridge from 1998 to 1999.
Career and research
She became an assistant professor at the University of Palermo in 2002. In 2005, she became associate professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and in 2009 she joined the University of Minnesota as a professor of chemistry. She was director of the from 2012 to 2014 and has been director of the since 2014. She has also been the director of the since 2011. She was appointed as Distinguished McKnight University Professor in 2014 and awarded a McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair in 2018. Her research focuses on the development of electronic structure methods and their use for understanding complex chemical systems. These systems have practical applications in terms of sustainability and nuclear waste management. Her work with theoretical chemistry also showed that a certain form of uranium forms quintuple bonds, which changed the way chemists view interactions between metal atoms. Gagliardi has an h-index of 71 according to Google Scholar. Her work has been cited in over 17,500 publications. She has served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation and is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the following journals: Journal of Catalysis, Chemical Reviews, ACS Central Science, The Journal of the American Chemical Society, Inorganic Chemistry,, Theoretical Chemistry Accounts, Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, and the Journal of Physical Chemistry.
