Lucía Aballe

Lucía Aballe is an experimental physicist with more than 25 years of experience in the study of surfaces, thin films, and nanostructures. After obtaining a PhD at the Freie Universitat Berlin, she worked at the Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and the Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste. In 2006 she became group leader at the Experiments Division of the ALBA Synchrotron, where she led the construction, commissioning, and use of the CIRCE soft x-ray beamline for photoemission spectroscopy, and microscopy until 2020. Between 2020 and 2022, she worked as senior scientist with the Mistral beamline for transmission x-ray microscopy and tomography. Since 2022, she has managed the InCAEM project in order to establish the infrastructure for in situ correlative analysis of advanced energy materials. Since 2023, she has headed the Interdisciplinary and Multimodal Section of ALBA, which develops transversal tools and technologies. In addition to serving as scientific proposal reviewer for several facilities and research agencies, she has published over 140 peer-reviewed articles and has been a guest lecturer on more than twenty occasions. She is also a frequent participant in outreach initiatives to make science accessible to the public, and to encourage girls to pursue scientific/technical careers.