Luca Bindi

Luca Bindi (born 1971) is an Italian geologist. He currently holds the chair of Mineralogy and Crystallography in the Department of Earth Sciences in the University of Florence. He is also a research associate at the Istituto di Geoscienze e Georisorse of CNR. He has received numerous national and international scientific awards that include the President of the Republic Prize 2015 in the category of Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences in the National Academy of Lincei.

He has received several awards for his research, including the Panichi prize for mineralogical investigations of the Italian Society of Mineralogy and Petrology (2004). In 2006, he received the Nardelli Prize awarded by the Italian Association of Crystallography. He has received prestigious international awards such as the Excellence Research Medal awarded by the European Mineralogical Union. In 2007 he was awarded the Foreign Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the Russian Mineralogical Society. He went on to win the "Luigi Tartufari Prize for Geology" of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. In 2010, he delivered a speech during the closing ceremony of the academic year in the presence of the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano. He won the prize of President of the Republic 2015 in the physical, mathematical, and natural sciences category of the National Academy of Lincei, delivered by the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, during a ceremony at the Quirinale. It is noteworthy that two of his scientific works related to the discovery of the first natural quasicrystal, icosahedrite, have been cited in the "Scientific Background on the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 - The Discovery of Quasicrystals " of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

He has numerous international collaborations, especially with Princeton University, Harvard University, and the California Institute of Technology.

The research activity (condensed in more than 250 scientific publications in international journals) mainly covers crystallographic structural studies of minerals characterized by incommensurate structures, superstructures, twinning, by integrating together mineralogy with the most advanced fields of crystallography. Among his research works, significantly the crystal-chemical studies of major mineral phases for the Earth's mantle, among which, of note, his pioneering studies of potassium-rich clinopyroxene, which have had broad international resonance.

His discovery of natural quasicrystals (published in Science in 2009) has had great resonance not only in the earth sciences community but also in the physical, chemical and materials science communities. It proves that quasicrystals can form spontaneously in nature and remain stable for long geological times.