Francesca Borghi is a Post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of Milano, and at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Nanostructured Materials and Interfaces. She graduated in Physics in 2011 from the University of Milano, and after that obtained her PhD in Physics in 2015 from the same university. Her main work deals with the characterization of the interfacial chemico-physical properties of nanostructured thin films, produced by low-energy clusters beam deposition in the gas phase. In particular, she uses atomic force microscopy for the characterization of the first stage of growth of thin films in the sub-monolayer regime (metallic oxides, carbon, gold) and for the study of the structural and functional properties of granular thin films (surface charge density, elastic and electrical properties). In this frame, she won a national fellowship (Centro Universitario Cattolico) supporting the development of micro- and nano-structured networks for the characterization of the in-vitro behavior of spatially confined neuronal cells. Her research activity focuses also on the study of the structural, mechanical and electrical properties of ionic liquids confined in porous matrices. She also developed a new approach for the characterization of the surface area and porosity of thin films by adsorption gas measurements.Francesca Soavi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Inorganic Chemistry "Giacomo Ciamician" of the University of Bologna. She graduated with a degree in Chemistry in 1996 and in 2002 received her PhD in Chemical Sciences, with a Thesis on “Electrochemistry of materials for Energy Conversion and Storage”. She is serving as a past-Chair of Division 3 'Electrochemical Energy Storage and Conversion' at the International Society of Electrochemistry. She is a co-author of more than 120 publications and she is involved in the knowledge transfer of research products by the StartUp BETTERY srl, that she co-founded in 2018. She has been awarded prestigious prizes in the context of electrochemistry of materials for energy storage/conversion devices. In 2019 she was the recipient of the Premio dei Premi prize awarded by COTEC-Fondazione per l’innovazione and the Senate of the Italian Republic.Paolo Milani is a Full Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Milano. He graduated in Physics from the University of Pavia (Italy) in 1984 and received his Docteur es Sciences (PhD) in 1991 from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale of Lausanne. In 1992, he founded the Molecular Beams and Nanocrystalline Materials Laboratory at the University of Milano. His research focuses on cluster-assembled nanostructured materials for neuromorphic systems, stretchable electronics, biomedicine and soft robotics. He has published more than 250 papers in peer-reviewed journals, several review papers and a monograph on supersonic cluster beam deposition for the synthesis of nanostructured thin films. Prof. Milani was the recipient of the U. Campisano Award, awarded to him from the Italian Institute for the Physics of Matter in 2000, for his contributions to the field of the synthesis and characterization of nanostructured materials. In 2006 he received the L. Tartufari Prize, awarded to him by the Lincei National Academy. Currently, Prof. Milani serves as the Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Nanostructured Materials and Interfaces at the University of Milano.
