Premios GEQO 2023

Miquel Costas

Miquel Costas graduated in Chemistry at the University of Girona (UdG) in 1994, where he also pursued PhD studies in the group of Professor Antoni Llobet. Research work during the PhD involved scientific stays at Texas A&M under the supervision of late Prof Derek Barton (June-December 1996), and in Basel at the group of Prof. Andreas Zuberbüehler (April-May 1998). After defending his PhD dissertation in February 1999, he moved to the group of Prof. Lawrence Que, Jr, at the University of Minnesota. Work in Minneapolis was funded by a Postdoctoral Grant from Fundació La Caixa and focused in the modelling of functional models of non-heme iron depending oxygenases. In September 2002 he returned to Girona with a Ramon I Cajal Fellowship. He become Professor Titular in April 2003 and Catedrático de Universidad in December 2022.

Since January 2005 he started his independent career. From 2013 to June 2015 he was sub-director of the Institute of Computational Chemistry and Catalysis. Research interests have been focused on three main projects:

a) Study of structural and functional modelling of non-heme iron, manganese and copper oxygenases, as well as its application as selective oxidation catalysts, specially focusing in enantioselective transformations and in the characterization of hypervalent intermediates,
b) Development of iron catalyzed water oxidation reactions and
c) Self-assembly of nanoscopic containers based on metal-directed coordination of macrocyclic metal complexes.

This research work has been consistently funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Spanish Ministery of Science and the European Research Council. Research work arising from these projects include over 200 publications, 16 book chapters, and 5 patents, and he has co-edited with Prof Marcel Swart the book “Spin States in Biochemistry and Inorganic Chemistry” from Wiley. He has directed 23 PhD thesis. He was awarded with the ICREA Academia Award in 2009, 2013 and 2018, in 2014 with the prize of the RSEQ to excellence in Research, and was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2019. He has been invited visiting professor of the Debye Institute for Catalysis of Utrecht University and in the University of Paris Diderot.

Julio Lloret-Fillol

Julio Lloret-Fillol graduated in Chemistry from the University of Valencia (2001), where he obtained his PhD in 2006 under the supervision of Prof. Pascual Lahuerta and Prof. Julia Pérez-Prieto (2006), focusing on catalysis and organometallic chemistry. Then, he moved to the University of Heidelberg under the supervision of Prof. Lutz Hans Gade as Marie Curie postdoc fellow. He returned to Spain in 2010 thanks to the Ramón y Cajal program, starting his independent career at the University of Girona, researching water oxidation with iron molecular complexes. In 2014, he became a Young Research Group Leader at the Institut de Química Computational i Catàlisi (UdG), and, since late that year, he started as Group Leader at the Institut Català d’Investigació Química (ICIQ).

In 2015, he was appointed ICREA Professor at the Institución Catalana de Investigación y Estudios Avanzados (ICREA) and received a grant from the European Research Council Consolidator Grant (ERC-CoG) to investigate photocatalytic reduction and artificial photosynthesis.

His scientific interests include chemical reactivity, synthetic methodology, artificial photosynthesis, catalysis in general, computational chemistry, and the study of reaction mechanisms. He is also interested in automation technologies applied to chemistry. His research group has specialized since 2015 in photo- and electrocatalysis to develop new reactivity in the context of artificial photosynthesis for the synthesis of fuels and fine chemicals, including water oxidation and water and CO₂ reduction, as well as exploring these concepts to develop organic reactivity. We have developed new catalysts directly on electrodes to produce green hydrogen through electrolysis, as well as in the design of devices for their study.

Lloret-Fillol has published over 107 articles in high-impact journals and has been invited to more than 85 conferences. He has been active in technology transfer, holding eight patents and co-founding three spin-off companies. He co-founded Treellum Technologies (Chief Scientific Officer (CSO)), Gioxcat (Advisor), and most recently, JOLT Solutions (Chief Scientist (CS)). The later secured Series A investment for industrializing electrode manufacture for Alkaline Electrolyzers. At JOLT, we are applying a new technology that we have patented for the growth of catalysts on surfaces in industrial manufacturing of electrodes to produce green hydrogen with alkaline electrolyzers.

The results of his research have been recognized in several awards, such as the Thieme Chemistry Journals Award, Young Academy of Europe, Young Researcher Award 2015, Young Researcher Award 2014 of the Organometallic Group of the RSEQ and the recent GEQO Award 2023 for Research Excellence.

Alba Collado Martínez

Alba Collado Martínez graduated in Chemistry at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2007. Thereafter, she began her PhD studies at the Universidad de Zaragoza-Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Aragón in the group of Professor Miguel Ángel Esteruelas with a JAE predoctoral fellowship. She synthesised and studied new reactivity of osmium- and ruthenium hydride complexes towards unsaturated molecules. As a PhD student, she spent 2 months in the group of Professor Robert H. Morris at the University of Toronto and 3 months in the group of Professor José Luis Mascareñas at the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela.

After obtaining her PhD in 2012, she moved to Scotland as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews, in the group of Professor Steven Nolan. Her research projects focussed on the development of gold compounds with N-heterocyclic carbene ligands for catalytic applications. In 2015 she undertook a second Postdoctoral position in the group of Professor Guy Lloyd-Jones at the University of Edinburgh. She carried out a collaborative project with the company Pfizer on mechanistic studies of challenging Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling reactions.

In 2017 she was awarded a Juan de la Cierva-Incorporation fellowship to return to Spain.  She held that position at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in the bioorganometallic chemistry group led by Professor Miguel Ángel Sierra. In this group, she worked on the synthesis of molecular models of hydrogenase enzymes [FeFe] as electrocatalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction.

Since 2019 she is an Assistant Professor in the Inorganic Chemistry Department at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, hosted by the Froncat group. Her research interests span a range of topics in organometallic chemistry and catalysis. Currently,  she is working on the synthesis and design of new organometallic catalysts for photocatalysis and CO₂ functionalisation.

Alba has co-authored 41 publications, including a book chapter.