Prof. Guillem Aromí
GMMF Leader. Full Professor of the Department of Inorganic and Organic Chemistry, Universitat de Barcelona.
Director of the Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (IN2UB) since 2018.
Born in Barcelona in 1969, Dr. Guillem Aromí graduated in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of Barcelona (UB) and EHICS (Strasbourg, France), respectively, in 1993. He earned his PhD in Chemistry at one of the top ten universities in chemistry of North America, Indiana University (1999, USA) in the Group of Prof. George Christou. His doctorate occurred at a very crucial period in his laboratory; it was the time of the discovery of single molecule magnets. His PhD work consisted on the synthesis and physical studies of manganese coordination clusters with interest in bioinorganic chemistry and in molecular magnetism. His successful doctorate work (18 papers) warranted him a Postdoctoral Marie Curie Fellowship of two years at the group of Prof. Jan Reedijk (Leiden University, Holland, 2002). After this period he spent 16 months as Post-doctoral Research associate with the team of Prof. Winpenny (Manchester University, UK, 2003). These two periods allowed Dr. Aromí to learn and develop different methodologies for the synthesis of functional coordination compounds. From the work with his posdotoral mentors, Dr Aromí published 24 papers. He became in 2003 a Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the UB, then he was Associate Professor of Chemistry since 2007 and currently, he is Full Professor at the UB since October 2018.
In 2007, he received the three year distinction by the Generalitat de Catalunya for Incentivation of Research. Dr. Aromí was able to soon start his own research group (Group of Magnetism and Functional Molecules, GMMF, http://www.gmmf-ub.com/) which was recognized as “emerging group” by the Generalitat de Catalunya. The activity focuses on the preparation and study of coordination molecules with various applications in nanotechnology. Among the important contributions to innovation is the preparation of the first molecular prototypes of spin-based quantum gates. The group received funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education under the scheme for young researchers, and was able to renew this grant three years later with increased funding. The excellence in university research of Dr. Aromí was recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya with the prize ICREA Academia 2008, 2012 and 2018. Also, Dr. Aromí received in 2011, an ERC Starting Grant in order to develop his proposal of using magnetic molecules for quantum computing. In 2013, the Generalitat de Catalunya awarded him the prize ICREA Academia for the second time, thus, turning into one of the few scientists having received this prestigious price twice. Since 2014, the group enjoys the status of “consolidated” (2014-SGR-129) by the catalan goverment, being the only group of the Inorganic chemistry department having received funding for this concept. Dr. Guillem Aromí chaired the Vth International Conference on Molecular Materials in 2012, co-organized a Symposium at the EMRS 2014 Spring Meeting (Molecular materials - towards quantum properties) and is the main organizer of the EMRS 2015 Fall Meeting symposium “Molecular Materials for Quantum Computing”. Since he is based in Barcelona, Dr. Aromí has been invited as visiting scholar to various universities (Leiden University, Holland; Monash University, Australia; Bordeaux University, France; University of California Berkeley, USA). In addition he has pronounced 35 lectures at international conferences, 20 as invited speaker. He has also been invited to impart research seminars to 29 universities throughout the world.