Sergi Posada-Pérez, Juan de la Cierva-formación researcher at the Institute of Computational Chemistry and Catalysis

Starting 1st July 2021, Sergi Posada-Pérez has become a Juan de la Cierva-formación postdoc researcher of the Institute of Computational Chemistry and Catalysis (IQCC) working in the DiMoCat group.

Sergio Posada-Pérez received his BSc in Chemistry and MSc in Theoretical Chemistry from the Rovira and Virgili University. The Master thesis was carried out under the supervision of Prof. Josep Maria Poblet and Dr. Anna Clotet and it was graded as excellent.

His PhD studies, supervised by Prof. Francesc Illas and Dr. Francesc Viñes, were focused on environmental chemistry, developing new cost-effective catalysts to convert harmful greenhouse effect gases to valuable compounds by means of ab initio computations. The most remarkable achievement of his thesis was to discover an excellent and promising catalyst for green chemistry reactions, especially for the CO2 hydrogenation reaction towards CO and methanol. During his thesis, he published 10 papers (9 of them as first author). In addition, the thesis was graded as Excellent “cum laude” and he received the extraordinary PhD mention award 2017-2018. During his Ph.D. he also did two internships (with a total duration of 6 months) in two research groups with international reputation in his research field. The first one, was in the group of Dr. José Rodriguez at Brookhaven National Laboratory, interacting first-hand with experimental partners. As a result of this internship, two peer-reviewed articles were published in JACS and Catalysis, Science & Technology (including one backcover). The second stay was in the group of Prof. Nora de Leeuw, at the Cardiff University, where he conducted a new research project about the CO2 reduction reaction on Iron/nickel sulfides, published in PCCP in 2018.

From June 2018 till June 2021, he conducted postdoctoral research in the group of Prof. Geoffroy Hautier at Université Catholique de Louvain. He carried out a research project that allowed him to underpin the mechanisms and factors that govern the water interaction with several well-known cathode materials for Li-ion rechargeable aqueous batteries by means of computational simulations.

During his postdoc in the IQCC, he will study the molecular structure and charge transfer processes of hybrid fullerene:perovskite solar cells. His large experience using the VASP program will be very helpful!

We wish him good luck and great success in his research work at DiMoCat!

Visit of Kamila Pruszkowska

Kamila Pruszkowska is a PhD student supervised by Prof. Michal Cyranski in the University of Warsaw . She has been working in our group for the last six weeks working in the study of the 1,2-bis(4-methylbenzoylvinylamino)ethane and Ni (II) 1,3-bis(4-methylbenzoylvinylamino)propane Ni(II) complexes coordinated to pyridine, 4-dimethylaminopyridine, 4-metoxypyridine, N-methyloimidazole, and thiazole ligands. She has been financed by an HPC-Europa3 fellowship and during her stay in our group she has been supervised by Dr. Olga A. Stasyuk and Dr. Miquel Solà. We are very happy to have had her in our group! We hope she has enjoyed her stay!

Kamila in the center with Olga and Miquel

Two new fellowships to Alex Díaz and Cristina Castanyer, PhD researchers in training

This week we have known that Alex Díaz has got the prestigious FPU fellowship of the Spanish Ministerio de Educación and Cristina Castanyer has got the FPI fellowship that the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia awarded to the project CTQ2017-85341-P lead by Anna Pla and Miquel Solà. Alex Díaz is already a research in training supervised by Anna Pla and Anna Roglans and he is working on cyclization reactions catalized by Rh carbenes. Cristina Castanyer will start her PhD supervised by Anna Pla and Miquel Solà and she will work on [2+2+2] cycloadditions to fullerenes.

Congratulations to Àlex and Cristina!