UNIVERSITY OF FERRARA
University of Ferrara (Unife) established in 1391 by the Marquis Alberto V d’Este, is one of the oldest universities in Italy. Unife has about 23000 undergraduate students in all areas of sciences, 596 permanent academic staff and 336 PhD students.
TEAM MEMBERS
Professor
Simone Meloni
The UniFe team is led by Prof. Simone Meloni (Male), leader of the Laboratory of Materials Modeling and Simulations - LMMS. He joined the university of Ferrara in June 2019 after spending a few years at the University of Rome - Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, École Fédérale de Lausanne - Science and Engineering Chemistry Institute, University College Dublin - School of Physics (FP7 MSC fellow). Presently, Prof. Meloni leads the theoretical unit of the H2020 Future and Emerging Technologies project Electro-Instrusion (3.6M€, 560k€ budget for the UniFe team), aiming at developing regenerative shock absorbers to recover dissipated vibrational energy and transform it into electric energy. In addition to Electro-Instrusion, during his career Prof. Meloni has been PI or CO-I in competitive projects globally worth ~2.5M€. During the last 10 years Prof. Meloni contributed to the progress of 3rd generation solar cells; in particular, he contributed to seminal works in the development of multi-cation and multi-halide perovskites, identifying the origin of hysteresis in lead-halide perovskites, and the temperature dependence of the optoelectronic materials of the same materials.His research in the field of PV has been often developed in collaboration of international well established (e.g., Prof. Graetzel) or younger very promising researchers (e.g., Prof. Abate, Prof. Tress, Prof. Saliba, Prof. Dar). Some of the computational methods developed by Prof. Meloni are implemented in community codes, such as LAMMPS, CPMD, MiMiC.
email: simone.meloni@unife.it
telephone: 0532 455174
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Postdoc
Andrea Le Donne
Andrea Le Donne is a post-doc researcher in the Laboratory of Materials Modeling and Simulation led by Prof. Simone Meloni. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Sapienza University in Rome, studying proton mobility within ionic liquids inspired by biomolecules. After his Ph.D. he worked for three years within the European FET project "Electro-Intrusio" at the University of Ferrara, studying the mechanisms of intrusion/extrusion processes in hydrophobic nanoporous materials and the heat exchanged in such processes. During his studies he applied his acquired knowledge of classical molecular dynamics, ab initio calculations, ab initio molecular dynamics, and enhanced sampling techniques.
email : andrea.ledonne@unife.it
PhD Candidate
Ribhu Bhatia
Ribhu Bhatia obtained his master’s degree in energy engineering in 2022 from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, with a thesis on effects of surface wettability on evaporation rate of a sessile droplet at ‘Multi-Scale Modeling Laboratory’ in Politecnico di Torino. He was also a part of the SMARTFAN project which received funding from European Union (Horizon2020 research and innovation programme) at Politecnico di Torino in the group of Prof. Pietro Asinari. Hes is now a PhD research fellow in the ‘Laboratory of Materials Modeling and Simulations’ group at the University of Ferrara in Italy, under the supervision of Prof. Simone Meloni. His research focuses on understanding the underlying physics of perovskite solar cells, especially interfaces, to improve its operational stability.
email : ribhu.bhatia@edu.unife.it