Fitxa persona

Rafael Muñoz-Espí is an Associate Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Valencia. He graduated in Chemistry at this university (Licentiate Degree in 2001). He was awarded a postgraduate fellowship by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Foundation “La Caixa” to conduct his doctoral studies in Germany. From 2002 to 2006 he worked under the supervision of Prof. Gerhard Wegner at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) in Mainz, and he received his doctoral degree in 2006 from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz.

In 2007, he moved to the USA as a Postdoctoral Associate in the group of Prof. Benjamin Chu at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he worked for two years, with frequent stays at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. From 2009 to 2015, Dr. Muñoz-Espí was Group Leader of the team "Polymer/Inorganic Hybrid Colloids" at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, in the Department of Physical Chemistry of Polymers headed by Prof. Katharina Landfester. During this time, he was responsible for several projects and industrial contracts at national (German) and international level.

In September 2015, Dr. Muñoz-Espí joined the Institute of Materials Science of the University of Valencia (ICMUV) as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Fellow. Since May 2021, he has been an Associate Professor at this institution.

Dr. Muñoz-Espí has coauthored more than 95 scientific peer-reviewed publications in high-ranking international journals and 6 book chapters. He acts periodically as a reviewer for scientific agencies and for several chemistry and materials science journals. His current research interests include mineralization processes, the synthesis of polymeric and hybrid nanoparticles, crystallization in colloidal systems, and the study of the interaction of polymers with inorganic matter. In the last years, he has conducted research and teaching stays as a visiting professor/scientist at the Bar-Ilan University (Israel, 2016), the University of Padova (Italy, 2018), and the Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas (Ecuador, 2018).

In addition to chemistry, he is interested in linguistics. He holds a B.A. in Catalan Language from the University of Andorra (2015) and a B.A. in Catalan Language and Literature from the Open University of Catalonia (2016). He has studied the morphological and semantic specificity of the Andorran neology (see here).