What were the topics and titles of your dissertation in the first two PhD? Were they related to this topic or totally different?

Edit: https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=61429 It looks quite unrelated

This is their referenced 2013 paper on the subject:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258423577_Data_Stor...

Clearly they have been working on this for over a decade.

First PhD: algebraic cryptanalysis (Pisa). Second PhD: exact solutions to the Schrödinger equation for few-body systems (UCF). Both unrelated to fluorographane — the connection emerged later.