9th MDPI Guest Editor Club 2026 | Chemistry & Materials Science Session

Institute of Nanostructured Materials (ISMN), Italian National Research Council (CNR), Palermo, Italy;
Attracting Quality Submissions and Processing Quality Manuscripts for a Special Issue
Dr. Francesca Deganello is a Senior Researcher at CNR-ISMN Palermo with expertise in the sustainable synthesis of nanomaterials for energy and environmental applications and serves as the ISMN scientific coordinator of several national, European, and international research projects. Her research focuses on the design, synthesis, and characterization of perovskite-type mixed oxides and perovskite oxide-based systems for high-temperature clean energy production and catalytic processes for the remediation of wastewater and air pollutants. Her work places particular emphasis on sustainable solution combustion synthesis, exploiting renewable precursors derived from organic and inorganic waste streams and natural secondary raw materials to develop greener approaches for advanced functional materials. She also has extensive expertise in X-ray powder diffraction and Rietveld refinement for the quantitative phase and structural analysis of perovskites and other complex oxide systems. She currently serves as Editorial Board Member and Guest Editor for Sustainable Chemistry, having previously served as Topic Editor. She is also an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of the Electrochemical Society of India (JECSI), an active reviewer for leading materials chemistry journals, and Collection Editor of a topical collection on sustainable chemistry education.

School of Agriculture and Biology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China;
Behind the Scenes of a Sensors/Chemosensors Joint Issue: Personal Takeaways on Submissions, Reviews, and Everything In Between
Prof. Lu is an Associate Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University specializing in food safety and analytical chemistry. His main research interest involves food analysis using instrumental analysis techniques, including liquid chromatography, infrared spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, etc., combined with chemometrics modeling. He is currently studying non-targeted adulteration detection techniques for safety assurance in milk and other foods. He is also a member of the American Chemical Society. He has secured multiple research grants, published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, and received the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry Excellence in Review Award. His teaching spans undergraduate and graduate courses in food analysis and safety. He has acted as a guest editor for 4 Special Issues in MDPI's journals, among which the Special Issue in Chemosensors entitled 'Low-Cost Chemosensors for Applications in Environment, Health, Food, and Industry Process Control' received 27 articles and 98,649 views.