Fitxa persona

I graduated in Chemistry in 1989, in Universitat de Valencia and received my Ph.D. Degree in Chemistry in 1994 from the same university, under the supervision of Prof. Mestres. In 1995 I joined the group of prof. Sauvage (awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2016) at Université Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg, France), where I stayed for two years as postdoctoral fellow, working on the fields of electrochemically induced molecular motions in copper-complexed rotaxanes and new syntheses of catenanes and rotaxanes. In 1997 I returned to Universitat de Valencia and joined the Instituto de Ciencia Molecular (ICMol) with various postdoctoral research contracts, working on the synthesis of molecular motors, self-assembled metallosupramolecular architectures, and luminescent polypyridine metal complexes. In 2011, I joined the Instituto Interuniversitario de Investigación de Reconocimiento Molecular y Desarrollo Tecnógico (idm). In 2021 I became Full Professor of Organic Chemistry. Since 2022 I am the leader of the research group MODeLiC at the UV. My current research interests include the synthesis of chemosensors and molecular probes for the chromo-fluorogenic detection of cations, anions, hazardous gases and small biologically relevant molecules and the development of smart gated nanomaterials, based on mesoporous silica nanoparticles, for the controlled release of dyes or drugs for detection or therapy applications respectively.

As scientific contributions, I have authored or co-authored 105 articles in international chemistry journals and four book chapters. The Web of Science calculates a total number of citations of 4000, with an average of 117 cites/year and 39 cites/article, with an estimated h-index of 30. I have presented more than 100 communications in international and national chemistry congress and participated in 36 competitive Research Projects funded by the Spanish government, the local government or the European Union, 11 of them as Principal Investigator (PI) or co-PI.

As relevant contributions to society, I have 6 patents, five of them related to the detection of the date rape drugs. We have recently developed a kit for the detection of the drug GHB in alcoholic beverages and soft drinks (kit NOSUM) which have received great attention in the mass media, including television radio and newspapers, and I am a founding partner of the spin-off Optical Sens SL (January 2024), the first inter-university spin-off between Universitat de València and Universitat Politècnica de Valencia, dedicated to the development of sensors for drug detection. With respect to the formation of young researchers, I have directed 11 Doctoral Theses, and supervised 10 Master Theses.