Alessandra Beretta, born in Milan on August 17, 1967, is married since 2001 and is the mother of two children born in 2003 and 2006. She lives in Milan.
She graduated in 1992 in Chemical Engineering and got a PhD in Industrial Chemistry in 1996 at Politecnico di Milano. In 1994-1995 she has been visiting PhD student at Lehigh University (PA, USA), after receipt of a Fubright scholarship.
Since 2013, she is full professor of Chemical Engineering at the Department of Energy, Politecnico di Milano.
Her research interests are in the area of catalysis for energy conversion and environmental protection, including catalytic processes for the exploitation of natural gas, hydrogen production from fossil and renewable fuels, modeling of catalytic reactors, transport phenomena in structured reactors, kinetics of the conversion of light hydrocarbons to syngas or olefins to very short contact times, interaction between surface reactions and gas phase reactions. More recent interests involve the conversion of plastics, the upgrade of pyrolysis vapors, the abatement of elemental Hg from flue gases.
She is one the three members (with prof. Enrique Iglesia and prof. Graham Hutchings) of the Scientific Advisory Board of the iCSI, center for the Industrial Catalysis Science and Innovation, funded by the Research Council of Norway.
She has been chair of the Catalysis for Energy Topic of XIII EUROPACAT 2017.
She has served as Deputy Head for Research of the Department of Energy in the years 2017-2019.
Since 2018 she is coordinator of “Energy for Motion”, a 9 M€ 5-years project funded by MIUR, the Italian Ministry of Education, Research and University within the “Departments of Excellence Program”; the project consists of a development plan of the Department of Energy, focused on energy technologies for transportation. Four major research pillars are included in the project: H2 and new fuels, new engines and after-treatment solutions, fuel cells, batteries and electric vehicles.