Luisa De Cola is since November 2020 Professor at the University of Milan and head of the unit Materials for Health at the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri, IRCCS, Italy. She is also part time scientist at the INT-KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany.

She was born in Messina, Italy, where she studied chemistry. After a post-doc in USA she was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Bologna (1990). In 1998 she was appointed Full Professor at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

In 2004 she moved to the University of Muenster, Germany. In 2012 she has been appointed Axa Chair of Supramolecular and Bio-Material Chemistry, at the University of Strasbourg. She is recipients of several awards, the most recent being the Izatt–Christensen Award in Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry (2019), the gold Medal Natta (2020). She has been Nominated “Chevalier de la Légion d’ Honneur” by the President of the French Republic, François Hollande, and she is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, of the Accademia dei Lincei and fellow of the American Institute For Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).

Her main interests are luminescent and electroluminescent systems and their assemblies,  and nano- and porous structures for biomedical applications.