Francesc Illas - Biography#
Francesc Illas (1954) carried out his Chemistry Degree studies and Ph. D Thesis at the Universitat de Barcelona where, after several appointments at different departments, he became Full Professor of Physical Chemistry in 1992. Since 2008 he also serves as Director of the Institute of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry of the Universitat de Barcelona (IQTCUB ). He has been visiting scientists at the IBM Almaden Research Center (October 1989 to October 1990) and made several short scientific stays to several research centres worldwide: the same IBM research center (summer of 1993, July 1996), the Los Alamos National Laboratory (August1996), the Excellence Centre of Advanced Materials Research and Technology of the Institute of Solid State Physics of the University of Latvia (June 2003) and, more recently, to the Center of Nanotechnology of the Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand (August 2011). In addition, he has been Invited Professor at Universita’ della Calabria, Italy (February 1997) and twice at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France (June 2000 and February 2007).
He received several research prizes such as the Distinguished Professor Mention for the University Research Promotion awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2001, the Bruker Physical Chemistry Research Award of the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry in 2004 and the ICREA Academia Award for Excellence in University Research in 2009 and again in 2015. In 2009 was elected Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences. In 2012 he joined the Editorial Board of Surface Science and of Theoretical Chemistry Accounts.
He has participated in the management committee of several European COST actions namely “Inorganic oxide surfaces and interfaces” (2006-2010) and “Reducible oxide chemistry, structure and functions” (2012-2016). He is one of the PIs of the Novel Materials Discovery (NOMAD) Laboratory, a European Center of Excellence which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 676580 and is involved in the “Theoretical Chemistry and Computational Modelling (TCCM) Master” which is an initiative of 25 European institutions from 6 different European countries and in the European Joint Doctorate on TCCM which is a Innovative Training Networks (ITN). Since 2006 he is also the Director of the Reference Network in R+D in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry (XRQTC) sponsored by the Catalan Government and coordinating research activity of groups working in this field at Catalan universities with the main aim to interact with chemical and pharmaceutical industry. Since 2012 he is member of the PE4 panel for ERC Advanced Grants.
His main interests are theory and electronic structure of materials with emphasis in computational materials science and its application in catalysis, photocatalysis and energy production. Francesc Illas is co-author of more than 590 papers which received over 16000 citations conferring him an h-index of 77 according to WoS (83 according to Google Scholar). He has given over 100 invited talks at international conferences and research institutions.
