Maria Losurdo is currently a Director of Research in the Institute of Nanotechnology at National Council of Research, and Professor of Materials Engineering at the University of Bari (Italy).

She received her Ph.D. degree in chemistry from the University of Bari, Italy, in 1994. Her thesis received the Award “Outstanding PhD thesis in Chemistry “G. Stampacchia” from the Università “La Sapienza” of Rome. She later had scholarships at the Ecole Polytechnique of Palaiseau (France) and the Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (NC-USA).

She has been Adjunct Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, North Carolina-USA, and invited lecturer at the Chemistry Department of Shandong University, China. She has been Coordinator and Principal Investigator of various European projects under the 7th FP and H2020 on nanotechnologies. Several of these have been recognised by the EU as Success Stories.

Her awards include a Diploma Recognition from the Optical Society of Americas (OSA), a Horiba SaS Industry Award for “Contribution to Innovation and Dissemination of Opical methodologies to Material Science” a ”Best Paper Award” of the MRS-Material Research Society.

She currently serves as a member of the editorial boards of “The European Physical Journal: Applied Physics” and of “Nanomaterials”.

She is the holder of 2 patents in the USA. Her current research interests include nanomaterials, nanofabrication, optical spectroscopies, photocatalysis, energy harvesting and storage, nanophotonics, plasmonics, biosensing and their applications.

She is the author or coauthor of 300 Science Citation Index (SCI) journal papers, editor or co-editor of 2 books with Springer-Verlag on Ellipsometry and Nanomaterials, 5 e-booklets and 7 book chapters, including the Handbook of Crystal Growth, with topics ranging from nanomaterials, nanotechnology, energy, plasmonics, and biosensing to optical metrology.