My most recent submission — carried out at the University of Liverpool under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Vezzoli and the co-supervision of Dr. James Morris — turns a single molecule into an ultrasensitive probe of its own surroundings. We drive a single-molecule junction with a square-wave bias (AC-STMBJ) and watch the current respond, and that response changes dramatically with the solvent. Pick a solvent below and watch the junction react in real time.
R. Listo†, J. M. F. Morris†, A. Sil, … R. J. Nichols, A. Vezzoli. Preprint · See in publications →
I'm an engineer who got pleasantly lost in chemistry and physics. PhD candidate of the National PhD programme in Micro- and Nano-electronics at Politecnico di Torino and the University of Pavia, with the best part of a year in the molecular-electronics group at Liverpool. When I'm not in the lab, the office, or my home office, I run on too much coffee and amateur rowing on the Po river.
RLI trained as an electronic engineer and then, somewhere along the way, fell happily down the rabbit hole of molecular electronics. In the next life I want to be a synthetic chemist — alias a black magician, manipulating the fundamental state of matter.
My PhD is part of the Italian National PhD programme in Micro- and Nano-Electronics, run jointly by Politecnico di Torino — with Prof. Mariagrazia Graziano, holder of a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship for Career Development — and the University of Pavia, with Prof. Piero Malcovati, an IEEE Senior Member who coordinates the national programme itself. It's been a happily nomadic few years, spent moving between laboratories across Europe.
I spent the best part of a year — nine of those months on-site — in Andrea Vezzoli’s molecular-electronics group at the University of Liverpool, where Andrea has since been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) grant, and where it truly sank in that research is what I want to do. I fabricated nanogap electrodes at the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) in Braga, in Jérôme Borme's nanofabrication group, through the European ASCENT+ programme, and spent time in Maciej Krzywiecki's extraordinary ultra-high-vacuum laboratory at the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice. Different labs, different clean rooms, the same stubborn obsession: working out what nature is really doing at the scale of a single molecule.
Outside the research itself, I spent two years on the executive committee of the IEEE PoliTo Student Branch — first as Partnerships Coordinator (2024), then as Vice Chair (2025) — because I genuinely enjoy bringing people together around science. In the end, that's what I'm in this for: good problems, good instruments and good company — ideally with a coffee in hand.
A running note of what I've been up to lately.
“Probing Solvent Dynamics at the Single-Molecule Limit” — our AC-STMBJ study of how a single molecule senses its own solvent — is now available as a preprint on ChemRxiv while it goes through peer review. Read the preprint.
I co-organised the workshop “Single-Molecule Electronics: From Fundamental Quantum Transport to Emerging Applications” (NSAW2) as part of #NanoSeries2026, the 5th Conference on Global Nanotechnology, hosted at the Politecnico di Torino on 15–17 June 2026 — gathering the community around molecular junctions, molecular electronics and sensing. I also presented our own single-molecule work there.
The programme featured a keynote by Latha Venkataraman (Columbia University) and invited talks from Edmund Leary (IMDEA Nanoscience), Carlos Sabater (University of Alicante), Ismael Díez-Pérez (King's College London), Masha Kamenetska (Boston University), Sara Sangtarash (University of Warwick), Colin Van Dyck (University of Mons) and Andrea Vezzoli (University of Liverpool). A lot of quiet work behind the scenes, and a real joy to see the community come together in Turin.
From #NanoSeries2026 — the NSAW2 workshop and the conference dinner.
On 8–9 September 2025 I presented a poster on my single-molecule work from Andrea Vezzoli's Molecular Electronics group at the University of Liverpool, at the Royal Society of Chemistry's Chemical Nanoscience Early Career Summer Symposium. A brilliant couple of days — sharing results, gathering feedback, and swapping ideas with fellow early-career researchers, with a few senior voices reminding us just how many directions a research career can take, in academia and beyond. Heartfelt thanks to the organisers, speakers and everyone who made it such a generous, supportive room.
“Rotaxane-Based Single-Molecule Junctions for Memory Applications” was presented at IEEE NANO 2025, the 25th IEEE International Conference on Nanotechnology — this time across the Atlantic, in Washington, DC. I didn't present this one myself: my supervisor, Prof. Mariagrazia Graziano, kindly carried it over for me. A molecular ring shuttling between two conductance states, as a route to non-volatile molecular memory. DOI
I was invited to present my doctoral research to Prof. Gianaurelio Cuniberti's group at the Chair of Materials Science and Nanotechnology, TU Dresden. The visit also included hands-on work — scanning electron microscopy (SEM), electron-beam lithography (EBL), spin coating and substrate preparation.
I presented our group's work on molecular electronics for computing and sensing at the Institute of Physics of the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice, together with my colleague Fabrizio Mo. With sincere thanks to Prof. Maciej Krzywiecki for the invitation.
Our first time-dependent, dynamic ab initio study of the frequency response of a molecule for molecular Field-Coupled Nanocomputing (FCN) — “Unveiling Charge Dynamics in Molecular Field-Coupled Nanocomputing” — was presented as an invited talk at IEEE NANO 2024 in Gijón by my supervisor, Prof. Mariagrazia Graziano.
My research sits at the nanoscale and runs across four connected threads: fabricating the devices, measuring charge transport through single molecules, simulating it from first principles, and building the metrology and instrumentation that keep the measurements honest.
Fabricating stable, solid-state single-molecule devices: wafer-scale nanogap electrode arrays and platforms for charge transport and molecular spin qubits.
Charge transport through single molecules, used both as functional devices and as local probes of their environment — from molecular memory to the dynamics of the electric double layer.
Before and alongside the experiments, I model what should happen. With density functional theory and non-equilibrium Green's functions (DFT-NEGF) I compute quantum transport through a single molecule, and with metadynamics I map the free-energy landscapes that govern how molecules switch and reorganise.
Measurement you can trust, and the instruments that make it possible. I work hands-on with custom low-noise platforms — like the LEVIATHAN 3.0 STM break-junction — and bring metrological rigour, from calibration to traceable, statistically sound characterisation, down to the single-molecule scale.
Most recent first. Full list on ORCID.
Nature Chemistry (2026).
Manuscript under review.
2025 IEEE 25th International Conference on Nanotechnology (IEEE NANO).
Full list on ORCID. Open-source code: The OpenSource MolPDK.
I'm always glad to discuss molecular electronics, instrumentation, collaborations and postdoc opportunities. Email is the best way to reach me.