Prof. Luigi Lay is currently Head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Milan. He graduated in Chemistry in 1990 at the University of Sassari and was awarded a PhD in Chemistry in 1994 at the University of Milan. After an EU-funded post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Konstanz (Germany), Prof. Lay moved back to Milan in 1996 as a Researcher in Organic Chemistry at the Italian National Research Council. In 2000, he became a Researcher in Organic Chemistry at the University of Milan, then an Associate Professor in 2010, and a Full Professor since 2017.
Prof. Lay has been the Principal Investigator of numerous national (Italian Ministry of Research, Fondazione CARIPLO) and international (European Commission) projects financed according to competitive calls for applications. He has been Chair of the COST Action “Innovation with Glycans: new frontiers from synthesis to new biological targets – INNOGLY”, and he is currently Coordinator of the HORIZON Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network “ACINETWORK”.
The research activity of Prof. is focused on carbohydrate chemistry and the use of synthetic glycans to investigate their biological properties. In particular, most of his current scientific activity is addressed to the synthesis of oligosaccharides/glycoconjugates endowed with immunological activity for the development of semisynthetic glycoconjugate vaccines.
Prof. Lay is an active member of the Italian Chemical Society and American Chemical Society, and In 2016, he was awarded the Research Prize “Organic Chemistry for Life Sciences” by the Organic Chemistry Division of the Italian Chemical Society.
Prof. Lay is the author/co-author of over 100 publications in international peer-reviewed journals, 6 book chapters, and two international patents.