Rate My Professor Allegra Franchino

Allegra Franchino is Associate Professor in Organic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at Durham University. Her research group develops homogeneous catalytic methods by merging transition-metal catalysis, organocatalysis, ligand design, and mechanistic studies to achieve site-, diastereo-, and enantioselective synthesis of added-value compounds from unsaturated feedstock substrates, with a focus on medicinally relevant carbo- and heterocycles. Since establishing her independent laboratory at Durham as Assistant Professor in September 2022, she was promoted to Associate Professor in July 2025 and has secured over €1.8 million in funding as principal investigator. Notable grants include a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship providing £1.52 million over four years in 2024 to advance stereoselective catalysis for fine chemicals, agrochemicals, and pharmaceuticals; a Royal Society Research Grant of £46,000 in 2023; and a Durham Ring-fenced Carbon Budget grant of £19,000 in 2024. As of February 2026, her group includes two postdoctoral researchers, three PhD students, and two Master's students.

Franchino received her BSc and MSc degrees at the University of Milan in the Gennari–Pignataro group, complemented by an Erasmus exchange at RWTH Aachen. She completed her PhD at the University of Oxford under Professor Darren J. Dixon from 2013 to 2017, funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD Fellowship. Post-PhD, she held a permanent position at an API-producing TEVA plant near Milan before resuming academic research with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ) in Professor Antonio M. Echavarren's group starting September 2018, pioneering the merger of gold and hydrogen-bond donor catalysis. She subsequently worked at ETH Zurich in Professor Bill Morandi's laboratory on skeletal editing of N-heterocycles and iron-catalyzed amination reactions. Her accolades include the Thieme Chemistry Journals Award in 2025, Wiley SCI Young Researcher Lecture Prize in 2021, and Best Talk Prize at the 28th SCI Postgraduate Symposium in 2017. Key publications encompass "Anthracene Bisurea as a Supramolecular Chloride Receptor for Additive-Free, Broad-Scope Gold(I) Catalysis" (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2026), "Late-stage diversification of indole skeletons through nitrogen atom insertion" (Science, 2022), "Gold-catalyzed synthesis of small rings" (Chem. Rev., 2021), "H-bonded counterion-directed enantioselective Au(I) catalysis" (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2022), and "Catalytic enantio- and diastereoselective Mannich addition of TosMIC to ketimines" (Chem. Eur. J., 2018).