Laura Gagliardi is the Richard and Kathy Leventhal Professor in the Department of Chemistry, with joint appointments in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the James Franck Institute. She also directs the Chicago Center for Theoretical Chemistry.
Prof. Gagliardi became an assistant professor at the University of Palermo in 2002. In 2005, she became associate professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. She joined the University of Minnesota as a professor of chemistry in 2009, was appointed as Distinguished McKnight University Professor in 2014, and was awarded a McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair in 2018. She served as the director of the DOE-funded Energy Frontier Research Center called Inorganometallic Catalyst Design Center from 2014 to 2022. Since 2022 she has been serving as director of the DOE-funded Energy Frontier Research Center called Catalyst Design for Decarbonization Center.
Gagliardi has received the Pauling Medal Award, the Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry of the American Chemical Society, the Award in Theoretical Chemistry from the Physical Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society, the Humboldt Research Award, and the Bourke Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Faraday Lectureship Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry, among others.
She is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. She is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Academia Europaea, the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science, and the World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists. She is an associate editor of the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, which is the leading theoretical chemistry journal in the world.
The Gagliardi group develops novel wave function-based quantum chemical methods and applies them to study problems related to renewable energies. We combine multireference theories with density functional theory. We develop force-fields from first principles to be used in classical simulations. We employ these methods to explore molecular systems and materials relevant to catalysis, carbon dioxide separations, photochemical processes, spectroscopy and heavy-element chemistry.