Massimo Olivucci
Massimo Olivucci is Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Siena, Italy. He also holds a research professorship in Computational Chemistry at the Bowling Green State University, Ohio where he directs the Laboratory for Computational Photochemistry and Photobiology. After his PhD at the University of Bologna (Italy) with Fernando Bernardi and a Postdoc at King’s College London (UK) with Michael Robb he started his independent career at the University of Bologna specializing in theoretical photochemistry. During this stage he played a leading role in establishing that conical intersections between Born-Oppenheimer potential energy surfaces are common mechanistic entities in light-induced organic reactions. At a later stage, his group was one of the first to use multiconfigurational quantum chemistry to construct hybrid quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics models of photoreceptors and fluorescent proteins which allowed the detailed investigations of their spectroscopy, reactivity and dynamics. Such knowledge was shown to be instrumental for achieving a detailed understanding of the photoisomerization mechanism of visual pigments and for directing the design and laboratory synthesis of biomimetic molecular devices. In 2010 he received the Angelo Mangini Gold Medal from the Organic Chemistry Division of the Italian Chemical Society.
As part of his Fellowship, Massimo Olivucci is working on the project Towards the engineering of a fluorescent rhodopsin.