Francesca Paradisi's Biography

Francesca Paradisi, Professor of Sustainable Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of Bern

Prof. Paradisi completed an MSc in Organic Chemistry from the University of Bologna in 1998 under the supervision of Prof. Cainelli. In 2002 she completed her PhD at the same institution with a thesis on the synthesis of non-natural amino acids via diketopiperazine scaffolds. She joined the group of Prof. Engel at University College Dublin as Post-Doctoral Fellow where she remained until 2005 and developed several projects mainly focused on amino acid dehydrogenases and their applications in the synthesis of non-natural amino acids. She joined Enzolve Technologies in 2005, a spin-off company of UCD where she worked on the use of mutant dehydrogeanse enzymes for neonatal screening of metabolic disorders. in 2006 she was appointed Lecturer in Chemical Biology at the Centre for Synthesis and Chemical Biology in UCD (fix term), and in 2009 she got a tenured lectureship at the UCD School of Chemistry. She was promoted in 2014 to Senior Lecturer and in 2016 she took up the position of Associate Professor in Biocatalysis and Enzyme Engineering in the School of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham. In 2019 she joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Bern as the Chair in Pharmaceutical and Bioorganic Chemistry and Professor of Sustainable Pharmaceutical Chemistry.