Postdoctoral Researchers

Iván Torres Moya was born the 19th October of 1990 in Ciudad Real.

He studied a Degree in Chemical Sciences (2008-2013) at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) with a final score of 9.0, receiving a Collaboration scolarship in his last academic course, beginning to form part of the group.

He complemented his academic background studying a Master Degree in Investigation in Chemistry (2013-2014) with a final score of 9.5. Meanwhile, he received a very competitive FPU scolarship to begin his PhD in the Department of Inorganic, Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the UCLM under the supervision of Dra. Pilar Prieto Núñez Polo and Dr. José Ramon Carrillo Muñoz (UCLM).

He obtained the International PhD in Chemical Sciences on 12^th February in 2019. During his PhD he acquired a lot of skills in Organic Chemistry, amongst them reactions under microwave irradiation, theoretical calculations, characterization of compounds employing different techniques and their application in different fields such as organic electronics, polymers, gels or biomedicine. He has attended more than twenty congresses related to his work and has written some scientific publications.

Furthermore, he has done some pre-doctoral stays. One of them in the group of Dr. Juan Teodomiro López Navarrete at the University of Málaga, one of the most relevant groups in the area of organic electronics in Spain, whose work is focused on the design and characterization of organic field-effect transistors (OFETs), and another one was in the group of Dr. Jonathan W. Steed in the University of Durham (United Kingdom), in which he worked with organogels and the crystallization of drugs.

Contact information:

Ivan.TorresMoya@uclm.es // Faculty of Chemical Sciences and Technologies// Avda. Camilo José Cela, 10 – 13071 Ciudad Real // Telephone Number: 926295300 Ext: 96345

Ana M. García Fernández acquired her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain) in 2011, with First Class Honors. She obtained her PhD in organic chemistry from the Complutense University (Madrid, Spain) in 2015, under the supervision of Prof. Martínez and Prof. Gil, focused on the design, synthesis and evaluation of phosphodiesterases inhibitors as novel potential drugs for the treatment of central nervous system disorders. During her PhD, she did two short stays: for the first, she joined Professor Luque’s group at the University of Barcelona in 2013 to perform molecular modeling and docking studies. In 2014, during her second stay, she spent five months with the group of Prof. Bräse (KIT, Germany) thanks to a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

In 2016, she joined the group of Prof. Marchesan in Trieste (Italy) as postdoctoral researcher, where she worked on ultrashort heterochiral peptides that self-assemble into supramolecular hydrogels. During that period, she secured funding for two years, in the form of a Ramón Areces Foundation fellowship, to investigate the potential of those heterochiral peptides to interfere with the formation of pathological amyloids involved in pathologies as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. In January 2019, she joined the group of Dr. Torbeev in the Institute of Supramolecular Science and Engineering (ISIS) at the University of Strasbourg in France. Her research was focused on the chemical synthesis of intrinsically disordered polypeptides to study their supramolecular self-assembly and aggregation into amyloids.

She moved to the Charles Sadron Institute (ICS) at the same university, to join the group of Dr. Ruiz-Carretero in September 2020. In this group, she worked in the synthesis and supramolecular characterization of self-assembled materials made of chiral, H-bonded pi-conjugated molecules to understand the role of chirality in organic electronics.

In January 2022, she has joined the UMSOC group as María Zambrano fellow to study the self-assembly of peptide-based materials using microfluidic devices, and to explore them as optical waveguide materials with applications in NMR spectroscopy.

Raúl Martín Lozano was born the 27^thApril of 1991 in Ciudad Real (Spain). He studied a Degree in Chemistry (2009-2014) at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) and obtained the award for academic achievement by Faculty of Science and Technologies of Ciudad Real.

He received a collaboration scholarship during the course 2013-2014 to carry out a research work based on microwave-assisted synthesis of heterocyclic compounds in the Chemistry laboratory of Microwaves and Sustainable Organic Chemistry (UMSOC) group. Then, he received a competitive FPU scolarship to begin his PhD in the same group under the supervision of Dra. Pilar Prieto Núñez Polo and Dr. José Ramon Carrillo Muñoz (UCLM).

He defended his PhD thesis titled “Benzothiadiazole and thiophene derivatives in Organic Photonics and Photocatalysis. Computational study of carbon nanomaterials” in 2020 obtaining the honorific Cum Laude distinction and the International mention.

During his PhD he worked in two big research lines. On the one hand, the synthesis of 1,3,4-thiadiazole, benzo[c][1,2,5]thiadiazole and 2,2’-bithiophene derivatives employing microwave irradiation as source of energy and their application in the field of organic photonics and photocatalysis. On the other hand, the use of Computational Chemistry as essential toolkit to avoid unnecessary synthesis, explain some experimental observations and establish structure-properties relationships for the design of new materials, including the modeling of carbon nanostructures. In this time, he completed a predoctoral stay at the University Federico II of Naples under the supervision of Prof. Michele Pavone where he carried out computational calculations about the organic molecule adsorption on graphene.

Raúl is author of more than 10 publications in international journals and he obtained some recognitions during his career: Accessit in the XII Young Science Symposium (2018) and Finalist in the “Three Minute Thesis” Competition (2018). He also has been part of the Editorial Committee of the “Molecule Magazine” of the Faculty of Chemistry in Ciudad Real (2015-2018).

After finishing his PhD, he joined to the Industrial R&D Department of the pharmaceutical company Servier Laboratories, S.L, where we worked in the preparation of new products and optimization of the existing ones and the scale-up production in GMP conditions.

He recently joined to the UMSOC group in collaboration with the pharmaceutical company Janssen, developing a project about the use of organometallic compounds for novel transformations in flow conditions.