Chemistry officially arrived in Pisa in 1757 due to Francesco II, first "Granduca di Toscana", who built a "Cattedra" of Chemistry in via S. Maria. In the following century, an important chemist, Raffaele Piria, initiated in Pisa a research on the natural organic substances and on the organic analysis. Successively, the "School of Pisa" hosted many distinguished chemists, such as Ugo Schiff and the famous Russian composer Aleksandr Borodin, and it developed high-level international relations as witnessed by the visit in Italy of Maria Curie in 1918. At the beginning of 1900, Raffaello Nasini who is recognized as one of the founder of the Physical Chemistry in Italy, taught in Pisa. In 1955 Eolo Scrocco of the famous "Scuola di via Panisperna", was invited to hold the chair of Chemistry, and in 1959 Piero Pino, one of the collaborators of the Nobel prize Giulio Natta in the research made at the Politecnico of Milan in the stereospecific polymerization, obtained the chair of Industrial Organic Chemistry.
Nowadays, five are the main thematic areas of the research in the Department of Chemistry in Pisa: Analytical Chemistry, Physical Chemistry, Industrial Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, and Organic Chemistry.
The research activities in all these areas are both of applied and fundamental nature, with strong collaborations with national and international laboratories, industries, and other universities. The international relations are very active both at the research level (with many collaborations between research groups in the Department and important research groups in Italy and abroad) and at the educational level with students that spend part of their curriculum in other universities.
The research activity can be classified according to the following thematic areas:
Analytical Chemistry
Environment; Cultural heritage; Analytical chemistry applied to foods, biomedicine, and human health; Research on reactivity kinetics in biological systems.
Physical Chemistry
Formulation of theoretical approaches and development of computational methodologies in molecular modeling; Magnetic Resonance and its applications to materials and liquid crystals; Thermodynamics of solvation processes; Thermodynamics and Spectroscopy of biological systems and food.
Industrial Chemistry
Catalysts and their application in the synthesis of organic molecules and macromolecules; Polymeric materials, biomaterials, materials for electronic devices, medical products, textiles, tanning and resins.
Inorganic Chemistry
Synthesis of inorganic and metal-organic compounds; Reactivity of metal-coordinated ligands and Catalysis; Nano-structured materials; Glasses; Recycling of precious metals from various matrices.
Organic Chemistry
Spectroscopic analysis of organic molecules with particular attention to systems of biological, biomedical and agricultural interest; Catalysis with Metal-Atoms systems; Synthesis of pheromones, fungicides and anti-carcinogens; Development of new synthetic methodologies based on the use of transition metal compounds.