Franchino
Lab
Allegra
Allegra Franchino is Associate Professor in Organic Chemistry and Homogeneous Catalysis at Durham University. She is originally from the lake city of Como, in Northern Italy, and her name means cheerful. She was trained in asymmetric catalysis, particularly using transition metals and bifunctional ligands, both during her BSc and MSc degrees at the University of Milan (Gennari–Pignataro group) and RWTH Aachen, and her doctoral studies at the University of Oxford under the guidance of Prof. Darren Dixon (2013–2017). After her PhD, she took a permanent post in an API-producing TEVA plant near Milan, but soon missed academic research too much. Hence, in September 2018 she joined the Echavarren group at ICIQ, Spain, supported by a 3-year MSCA COFUND fellowship, to learn about gold and H-bond donor catalysis. She then spent a year at ETH Zurich in the Morandi lab, working on iron catalysis, amination and N-heterocycles synthesis.​
In September 2022, she declined a MSCA individual fellowship to move to Durham University as Assistant Professor. Since joining Durham, she has secured over €1.8m in funding as a PI, including a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. Her group works on homogeneous catalysis for the synthesis of added-value products from unsaturated feedstock substrates (read more about her research here).
Awards and Funding
2025 | Thieme Chemistry Journals Award5
2024 | UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, £1.52m, 4 years
2024 | Durham Ring-fenced Carbon Budget, £19k
2023 | Royal Society Research Grant, £46k, 1.5 year
2022 | Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellowship, €321k, 3 years [declined]
2021 | WILEY SCI Young Researcher Lecture Prize, awarded by the Organometallic Group and the Organic Division of the Italian Chemical Society to emerging investigators below 35 years old
2020 | Runner-up talk prize, I Virtual Symposium on the Synthesis of Carbo- and Heterocyclic Systems
2018 | Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie COFUND Postdoctoral Fellowship, €223k, 3 years
2017 | Best talk prize, 28th SCI Postgraduate Symposium on Novel Organic Chemistry, Bath
2013 | Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie PhD Fellowship, €201k, 3 years
2013 | Roche Continents, Salzburg, Austria. Week-long workshop on creativity and innovation, entirely sponsored by Roche for 100 selected European participants.
2012 | Erasmus Scholarship at RWTH Aachen, €1260, 6 months
2008 | National Italian Award for best high school graduates (100/100 cum laude Classical Diploma)
​