Laura Abad Galán (Assistant Professor)

Her research career has mainly focused on the synthesis and design of new lanthanide coordination compounds and their optical characterization for their potential application as molecular probes in biomedicine.

Laura Abad studied a degree in chemistry at UCM (Spain) from 2008 to 2013. Once she finished her degree in Spain, she obtained an international research scholarship CIPRS (Curtin International Postgraduate Research Scholarship) to develop her PhD studies at Curtin University (Perth, Australia). Her thesis was supervised by Dr. Max. Massi and Dr. Mark Ogden and consisted of the synthesis and characterization of lanthanide complexes based on β-triketones as a new antenna ligand. As part of her PhD studies, she carried out an 8-month research stay at St. Andrews University (UK) under the co-supervision of Dr. Eli Zysman-Colman. During this stay Laura worked on the synthesis of bimetallic (lanthanide-iridium) systems and their spectroscopic characterization. Her thesis finished in 2018 with special mention cum laude. The following publications can be highlighted from her doctoral work: Inorg. Chem., 2017, 56, 8975-8985, Eur. J. Inorg. Chem, 2019, 2, 152-163, Nanoscale, 2019, 11, 10190-10197).

Her postdoctoral stage started with 6 months at Curtin University and continued, since January 2019, in Dr. Olivier Maury's group at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France). During her time in France, Laura worked primarily on lanthanide molecular probes for theranostic (detection and treatment) applications in cancer cells. One of the most characteristic publications of this study can be seen reflected in Inorg. Chem. Front., 2021,8, 2213-2224. In addition, she worked on optical chirality studies (Inorg. Chem. Front., 2021,8, 914-926) and led the spectroscopic characterization of multiple international collaborations (Chem. Eur. J., 2021, 27, 7288-7299, Corresponding author. Inorg. Chem. 2021, 60, 21, 16194-16203, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2020,22, 12373-12381).

In January 2022, Laura obtained a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Inorganic Chemistry at the Faculty of Chemical Sciences of the UCM, where she joined the MatMoPol group.

Her research career has resulted in the publication of more than 25 papers, the attendance to multiple international congresses with oral communications, several awards to travel and develop international research stays and a big circle of international collaborators with whom she keeps open parallel research lines.