Luisa Torsi is a professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Bari and president of the Regional Center on Single-Molecule Digital Assay. She received her laurea degree in Physics and the PhD in Chemistry from UNIBA and was post-doctoral fellow at Bell Labs in USA. In 2010 Torsi was awarded the Merck prize and in 2019, she received the Distinguished Women Award from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). Torsi is the winner of the Wilhelm Exner Medal 2021, a prize awarded since 1921 by the Austrian Industrial Association and the Premio del Presidente della Repubblica dell’Accademia dei Lincei. She is also a member of this Accademia.
Since 2020 she has been appointed National Representative for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action of Horizon Europe by the Italian Minister for Education and Research. She is also past-president of the European Material Research Society, the first woman to serve in this role. Torsi has also been elected 2017 Fellow of the Material Research Society, for pioneering work in organic (bio) electronic sensors and their use for point-of-care testing. She is also Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry since 2022. Presently she is serving as Vice-President of the Scientific Committee of the Italian National Research Council. She is also the President of MEDISDIH S.c.ar.l., the evolution of the Apulian Mechatronics technology district.
Torsi has authored ca. 260 papers, published also in Science and Nature journals. Her works collected almost 18.000 Google Scholar citations resulting in an h-index of 67. Gathered research funding for over 40 M€, comprises several national and European projects, mostly coordinated by her. Torsi is committed to the role-modeling for younger women scientists. In a recent campaign by Fondazione Bracco, she was featured in a story of TOPOLINO (Italian series of Disney comics), as “Louise Torduck”, a successful female scientist of the Calisota valley.