María Giménez López

Dr. Maria Gimenez is Principal Investigator at CiQUS (University of Santiago de Composterla) and holds an Oportunius Research Professorship (ERC Program–Xunta Galicia). She also serves as Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham. After joining USC, she triggered the creation of a strategic research group on Condensed Matter & Functional Materials (MAT2) acting as coordinator.

In 2006 she received her PhD from the University of Valencia working under the supervision of Prof. Eugenio Coronado on multifunctional materials of interest in molecular magnetism (spin-crossover materials and discovery of piezomagnetism in Prussian Blue analogues). She then joined the Supramolecular Chemistry and Chemical Nanosciences Group of Prof. Neil Champness at the University of Nottingham working as postdoctoral research fellow for almost three years. During this time, she contributed to important discoveries– first observation of random tiling in 2D-molecular networks, first examples of self-assembled monolayer of optically-active endofullerenes, and assembly of molecular magnets in 2D structures templated by molecular networks. In 2009 she was awarded with a two-year Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship in the Nanocarbon Group of Prof. Andrei Khlobystov to work on controlling interactions between molecules and nanotubes forming unique types of materials with potential for electronic applications.

In 2011, she started her independent career as Royal Society Research Fellow and in 2015 she became Assistant Professor of Materials Chemistry in Nottingham where she developed key concepts for exploiting confined nanoswitches in nanodevices for applications ranging from spintronics to electrocatalysts. In 2018, she returned to Spain with a Ramón y Cajal contract, joined CiQUS to launch her ERC project ERC-STG "NANOCOMP", and later became Profesor Contratado Doctor and Profesor Titular. In 2021, she was awarded with a ERC-POC ZABCAT to overcome cathode degradation through catalyst confinement on metal-air batteries.

In 2012 she was awarded with a very prestigious prize (Emerging Investigator Award 2012) by the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry for outstanding and novel research. In two consecutive years (2016 & 2017) she became Emerging Talent SRUK/CERU Award finalist for the impact of her studies on the development of materials chemistry using carbon nanostructures. She was also selected by the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry to represent Spain at the 10th EuChemS Young Investigator Workshop 2018 (YIW2018), joining a group of the most promising chemists under 40.

Dr. Gimenez has carried out a number of relevant works with hybrid metal-carbon nanostructures, and her research is focused on the development and functional characterisation of hybrid nanostructures for spintronics and energy-related applications (electrocatalyst, fuel cells, metal-air batteries, water splitting– green H2 production …), e.g., assembling magnetic, electrical and electrochemical active nanoswitches within carbon nano-containers (aiming, for example, to increase durability), as well as developing a general synthetic methodology for the confinement of molecules, clusters and nanoparticles (i.e., production of scalable materials).