In this communication, the authors would like to share their research activity over the past twenty years in the field of the ?-conjugated oligomers and polymers. The interest in this area started in 1977 when Shirakawa, MacDiarmid and Heeger discovered that polyacetylene has a fairly high electrical conductivity after chemical doping. They were awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The three winners established that polymer plastics can be made to conduct electricity if alternating single and double bonds link their carbon atoms, and electrons are either removed through oxidation or introduced through reduction. The extra electrons or corresponding “holes” can then move along the “doped” molecule, making the conjugated polymer conduct electricity almost as well as a metal (Nature, October 12, 2000). Through interdisciplinary research chemists and physicits have taken the field further during the 1980s and 1990s. They have discovered that ?-conjugated organic polymers and oligomers can be induced to light up. Layers of these elecronically conducting polymers (ECP) and molecular materials could help to create a number of new technological applications in molecular electronics, organic solar cells, light-emitting diodes, photo-diodes, lasers, sensors and so on.

Our research team entered the field of ECP in the middle of the 1980s. Over the past ten years fifteen undergraduate students of Chemistry or Chemical Engineering have joined our group to complete their Final Project, which qualify themselves to obtain their Laureate degree. In addition, most of them reached the team lacking of competence or any previous knowledge in computational chemistry, spectroscopy, electrochemistry and so on. Nonetheless, students motivation to learn allowed them to quickly develop a good understanding of these disciplines during a typical period of one academic course (8-10 months), after which they wrote a “dissertation” and defended it in front of a official committee of three permanent staff professors. The main results of these Final Projects were then published in various scientific top journals, being the students included as the first author among the co-authors list.