The Silver Plaque for the ‘Chini Memorial Lecture 2025’ was awarded to Paolo Fornasiero, professor in the Department of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Vice-Rector for Research at UniTS, for his ‘fundamental contribution to the study of the relationships between the structure and properties of inorganic materials and their impact on energy and heterogeneous catalysis’.

The award was presented in Pisa during the 23rd National Congress of the Industrial Chemistry Division of the Italian Chemical Society.

Previous award winners include Nobel Prize winners Jean-Marie Lehn (Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France), Ernst Otto Fischer (Technische Universität München, Garching, Germany) and Geoffrey Wilkinson (Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, UK).

At the congress, Paolo Fornasiero presented a plenary lecture entitled “The criticality of metal particle size speciation in sustainable catalysis”.