Clivia Sotomayor

An ICREA research professor at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), she has a PhD in Physics from the University of Manchester and has taught in universities around Europe, among them the University of St Andrews (Scotland) and the University of Wuppertal (Germany). She has been an ICREA researcher since 2007 and heads the ICN2 research team, a pioneer on the European scale working on nanofabrication and phonon engineering, the phonon being one of the main “quasiparticles” in nature. One of the aims of the group, which consists of seventeen eminent scientists, is to understand the properties of phonons in nanoelectric devices. In future, the results of her research could lead to the development of methods of energy transfer without heat dissipation and therefore with almost no energy loss. She has published more than five hundred scientific articles and her research work has been recognised with many prizes as well as being funded by institutions like the Royal Society of Edinburgh.