Interview with Camilla Coletti

What does your research team focus on?

We work in the field of two-dimensional materials (2D), a research area that has recently emerged and is incredibly exciting. After the discovery of graphene in 2004, this material has generated enormous interest: transparent and with the thickness of just one atom, it is extremely strong and flexible, with remarkable electronic properties. Following graphene, many other 2D materials with unique properties have been discovered.

The field of 2D materials is indeed a new field of study, and these materials are a playground for physicists and chemists. In my group, we focus on synthesizing 2D materials using bottom-up techniques, using high-temperature reactors and highly sophisticated "recipes" that include gases, such as methane. By carefully adjusting temperature and pressure, we obtain materials only a single atom thick, of high quality. We study the properties of these materials both when considered individually, as a single layer, and when stacked like a deck of cards.

Some of these new 2D materials are completely unexplored: to think that you might be the first person to discover a specific property or a particular effect is extremely exciting! Once the material is known - a bit like knowing a friend - we think about its possible applications.

At the moment, we are mainly focusing on the optoelectronic and photonic applications of these materials, in addition to biomedical ones. In summary, we deal with the entire process from the synthesis of 2D materials to the final application. For this reason, the group is highly heterogeneous: currently we are about 17 people with backgrounds ranging from physics to chemistry, from electronic engineering to biomedical engineering.

When did you realize that you were going in the right direction?

In 2007, after completing my Ph.D., I started a postdoc at the Max-Planck-Institute in Stuttgart focusing my studies on graphene. Three years later, on October 5, 2010, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the two Russian physicists who had isolated and studied graphene just 6 years earlier. A few months later, I was hired by IIT with the challenging task of starting research on this material from scratch.

It was a risky choice for a postdoc: with no “senior” directing my research, I could either succeed or fail miserably.