Prof. David Écija

Prof. David Écija is an expert in condensed matter physics, surface and molecular nanoscience. He received a PhD degree in Physics from UAM, with a work on self-assembly of nanostructures on surfaces. He was awarded a Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship and moved to Prof. Barth ́s group at the Technical University of Munich, where he carried out a four-year stay working on functional molecular nanoarchitectures on surfaces. In January 2014 he joined IMDEA Nanociencia as Researcher and “Ramon y Cajal” fellow to develop nanomaterials on surfaces. Notably, he is the recipient of the ERC 2018 Consolidator Grant (ELECNANO). Since May 2019, he is Research Professor at IMDEA Nanociencia (tenured).

Our group is focused on the visualization and understanding of physico-chemical processes on surfaces, including three main lines of research: 

• Design of surface-confined metal-organic materials. Our main interest is to rationalize the coordination chemistry of functional metals on surfaces, creating unique architectures with advanced functionalities for sensing, catalysis, light emission, nanomagnetism and quantum information.  

• On-surface synthesis of functional nanomaterials. We focus on the exploration of unprecedented chemical reactions aiming at the design of novel 1D or 2D soft materials, envisioning impact in optoelectronics, carbon magnetism and quantum information.

• Nanocatalysts for energy applications. We pursue the on-surface design and atomistic characterization of metal-oxide, metal-organic or purely organic nanocatalysts of relevance for energy related applications, like water splitting or CO₂ reduction.