Founder and CEO
Dr. Guido Panzarasa
Guido Panzarasa (1988-) received his B.Sc. (cum laude) in Materials Science and his M.Sc. (summa cum laude) in Chemical Sciences from the University of Eastern Piedmont “Amedeo Avogadro” respectively in 2010 and 2012. He obtained his PhD (with honors) in Chemical Sciences from the same University in 2016 discussing a thesis on "Advances in Sensors: The Enabling Roles of Photocatalysis, Polymer Brushes and Exotic Characterization Approaches" with Dr. Katia Sparnacci. After a three-months research assistantship at Montanuniversität (Leoben, Austria) in the group of Prof. Dr. Thomas Griesser, he spent two years (2016-2018) as a post-doc at Empa (St. Gallen, Switzerland). In March 2018 he joined the Laboratory of Soft and Living Materials led by Prof. Eric R. Dufresne at ETH Zürich, where he started an independent and innovative line of research on the development of far-from-equilibrium biomimetic materials by merging systems chemistry with materials science. In 2020 he was awarded an ETH Career Seed grant to design programmable transient electrochemical systems.
On June 1st, 2020 he joined the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at ETH Zürich as a Group Leader in the Wood Materials Science Laboratory led by Prof. Dr. Ingo Burgert, where he established the “Active and Adaptive Wood Materials” (A2WM) sub-group (https://ifb.ethz.ch/woodmaterialsscience/the-group/research-and-thesis-projects/active-and-adaptive-wood-materials---dr--guido-panzarasa.html). Notable results achieved so far by the A2WM sub-group include the first report of chemiluminescent wood, an innovative iron-catalyzed laser-induced graphitization (IC-LIG) technique to obtain electrically conductive surfaces, as well as a variety of piezo- and triboelectric nanogenerators obtained from renewable resources. In 2023 he was awarded an SNF Project grant to develop wood-based luminescent solar concentrators for photovoltaic applications. Over the years, Guido Panzarasa has been involved in many industrial, Innosuisse-funded research projects: examples include the development of self-heating compositions, functional textiles (e.g. antimicrobial) and wood materials with improved properties (e.g. fire-resistant, UV-resistant, electrically conductive, piezoelectric, etc.).
On 28 March 2025 Guido Panzarasa founded the ETH Spin-off NeoChemurgy GmbH to further pursue his broad chemical research interests.
Author and co-author of more than 80 scientific publications in peer-reviewed international journals, in fields spanning from materials science to supramolecular and systems chemistry, polymer science, nanotechnology, and sustainable materials. A complete list of publications is available via ORCID (ID: 0000-0003-1044-0491), Scopus (ID: 37064892500), and Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=it&user=D_q7vHIAAAAJ&view_op=list_works).
Active reviewer for many different scientific journals (a complete list is available from Publons (https://publons.com/researcher/1342330/guido-panzarasa/). In 2017 he has been nominated Outstanding Reviewer by the journal Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical. In 2018 he received the Publons Peer Review Award “for placing in the top 1% of reviewers in Chemistry”.
Active member of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the Swiss Chemical Society (SCS), and the Italian Physical Society (SIF).