On October 1st, Dr. Francesco Zaccaria started his MSCA post-doctoral project entitled Recyclable polymers based on hybrid bicyclic lactones prepared by selective sp3 C-H activation (REPOLHYCA) under the supervision of Prof. Miquel Costas at the Institute of Computational Chemistry and Catalysis (IQCC) of the University of Girona (UdG). This 2-year fellowship will allow Dr. Francesco Zaccaria to start a new project devoted to the development of innovative and sustainable polymeric materials, based on lactone monomers prepared with the highly efficient and ecofriendly manganese catalysts developed by the QBIS-CAT group.
About of the REPOLHYCA project:
Commercial plastics are essential for our lifestyle and offer essential benefits to develop modern and advanced societies, but their inherent drawbacks in end-of-life management have caused severe and long-lasting environmental damage. The REPOLHYCA project seeks to contribute to the crucial effort of developing next-generation plastics, which need to be designed ex-novo to combine high performance with full recyclability.
The project focuses on aliphatic polyesters derived from bicyclic lactone monomers, which are drawing increasing attention due to their potential as useful and fully recyclable materials. Importantly, these polymers can be depolymerized back to their monomers, thus enabling a truly circular plastic economy. However, these materials’ performance and production costs are still unsatisfactory for commercial applications, mainly due to the complex and inefficient multistep processes required to access the monomers. The REPOLHYCA will overcome these limitations by leveraging on the expertise of Prof. Miquel Costas in selective C-H functionalization and Dr. Francesco Zaccaria in catalytic polymerization. The streamlined synthetic methodologies developed by the Supervisor’s group enable selective and one-step synthesis of the monomers starting from abundant substrates and using environmentally friendly catalysts and oxidants. Dr. Zaccaria’s expertise will then serve to convert these new monomers into polyesters and assess their material properties and recyclability.
Along with implementing strategies to reduce the use and optimize the recycling of traditional plastics, the development of innovative and intrinsically recyclable materials is a pillar of the European Green Deal. The REPOLHYCA project will contribute to this effort towards a truly circular economy.
About Francesco:
Dr. Francesco Zaccaria earned his PhD (Doctor Europaeus) in chemistry at the University of Naples, Italy in 2018 under the supervision of Prof. Vincenzo Busico, working on molecular olefin polymerization catalysis. During his time as a student, he undertook two internships in the UK with Prof. Manfred Bochmann (University of East Anglia, 2014) and Prof. George Britovsek (Imperial College, 2017) to improve his skills in synthetic organometallic chemistry and kinetic studies. His passion for NMR spectroscopy then led him to a four-year postdoc with Prof. Alceo Macchioni at the University of Perugia, focusing on polymerization, water oxidation, and (de)hydrogenation catalysis. In 2022, he returned to his Alma Mater with a REACT-EU fellowship: over three years, he collaborated closely with industry on polymerization projects, serving as a visiting scientist at SABIC Europe (2023) and project leader at the Dutch Polymer Institute (DPI, 2022-2023). After a spell in the private sector with Xplore LTD (2025), a company specialized in high-throughput experimentation, he joined the QBIS-CAT group at IQCC-UdG as a MSCA Fellow in October 2025. He is the recipient of the 2024 “Flavio Bonati” National Prize granted by the Italian Chemical Society to an outstanding under-35 researcher in organometallic chemistry. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8760-8638
Girona, November 24th, 2025
For more info: ges.iqcc@udg.edu