Francesca Calegari PhD

Dr. Francesca Calegari leads the Attosecond Science division at DESY and is a professor of physics at the University of Hamburg. The main focus of her research is to track and ideally control in real-time the electron dynamics occurring in systems with increasing complexity from simple molecules to molecules of biological interest and nanostructured materials. To this purpose, her group develops table-top light sources providing extreme time resolution (from a few femtoseconds down to attoseconds). In her group, XUV attosecond technology is used to understand the role of the electron dynamics in the photo-induced chemical changes that occur in our own biomolecules (e.g. DNA and proteins) in a bottom-up approach. Her research will allow disclosing the physical origin of a variety of light-driven processes of crucial importance in photo-chemistry and photo-biology. Her approach is fully synergetic with the possibility to resolve structural changes in biomolecules through femtosecond time-resolved x-ray diffraction using XUV/X-ray Free Electron Lasers (FELs).