Computational approaches are of nowadays of utmost importance in the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology, to understand the physics of new materials and to design more efficient devices.

Despite recent advances in specific fields, such as quantum chemistry and solid-state physics, much less attention have been paid to the multiscale integration of different computational techniques. Such integration is of fundamental importance to tackle several challenging applicative problems in nanoscience.

The computational activity of the Research unit will be to develop new computational methods for the Integrated Multiscale Computational Technology project of the IIT Computational Platform and to apply them to applications of large interest for the Energy and Smart Material platforms, such as semiconductor nanocrystals and organic-inorganic interfaces.

The research activities of the EHS platform are in the field of nanotoxicology and intensively focus on understanding the interaction between nanomaterials and living systems.

Currently, over a few thousand of nano-based products and applications have been identified in the market worldwide. A good percentage of such nanoproducts will be directly or indirectly interacting with biological systems since they are frequently used in pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, implants, food, nutraceuticals, cosmetics, but also in packaging, emissions, textiles and electronic materials. In this scenario, it is necessary to have a reasonably good understanding of the impact of nanotechnology on human health and environment to cope up with the fast rate of advances in the generation of new nano-based products. The lack of general agreement in defining nanomaterials standards and terminology is indeed contributing to increase a broad uncertainty towards their use. Hence, commercialization of products derived from nanoparticles may be very complicated, owing to the potential difficulties in gaining regulatory approval.

Although power conversion efficiency of solar cells based on organic materials and colloidal nanocrystals has steadily been increasing for the last couple of years, the device performance is still far from market requirements. Therefore new materials and device structures are under investigation.

Activity of IIT-Lecce unit aims to develop innovative low cost, hybrid solar cells based on colloidal inorganic nanocrystal and DSSC tecnology.

The activities of the MEMS group will develop new advanced sensors/actuators to be embedded either in robots or in-vivo and new technologies for realization of prosthesis and biomimetic advanced devices.

By virtue of their extremely small size, high performances, low power consumption, low cost and possible integration, MEMS technology and devices are being more and more exploited in robotics. Biomimetic and biological inspired systems are being possible because of the possible convergence in MEMS of smart materials, micro and nanoelectronics and energy generation and storage. MEMS technology can therefore enable both the embedding of novel, compact and more and more accurate sensors arrays in-vivo, in humanoid or animal robots and the fabrication of micro and miniature robots at relatively low unit cost. Robots with improved awareness of the external environment through MEMS sensors, will both expand their capabilities and make possible hazardous missions, or duties presently unimaginable.

The platform smart materials deals with the development of new composite materials ,pointing towards a synergistic performance of the different materials combined together. We study different potential techniques to merge together distinct materials, with so far well studied and established properties, in order to fabricate novel materials that can preserve the properties of the individual components, but most importantly that exhibit characteristics that would not be possible otherwise. Such composite materials can be incorporated in most of the present technologies, including transport, bioengineering and medical instrumentation, civil engineering, fashion, packaging, fire-retardant electrical enclosures, security, and sport.