Núria López is a Spanish chemist who is Professor of Chemistry at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ). She was awarded the

Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry The Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry (RSEQ) is a Spanish scientific society dedicated to the development and dissemination of chemistry, in its aspect of pure science and in its applications. It originated in 1980 after the split of the Spanish ...

Prize for Excellence in 2015.

Early life and education

López studied chemistry at the

University of Barcelona The University of Barcelona ( ca, Universitat de Barcelona, UB; ; es, link=no, Universidad de Barcelona) is a public university located in the city of Barcelona, Catalonia, in Spain. With 63,000 students, it is one of the biggest universities i ...

. She completed both her bachelor's and doctoral degrees there, earning a PhD in theoretical chemistry in 1999. López joined the

Technical University of Denmark The Technical University of Denmark ( da, Danmarks Tekniske Universitet), often simply referred to as DTU, is a polytechnic university and school of engineering. It was founded in 1829 at the initiative of Hans Christian Ørsted as Denmark's fi ...

(DTU) Center for Atomic-scale Materials Physics, where she worked in the laboratory of Jens Nørskov.

Research and career

In 2001 López returned to

Barcelona Barcelona ( , , ) is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within ci ...

and became a ''Ramón y Cajal'' fellow at the

. She established her own research group in the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ) in 2005, which studies photo-electro-catalysis. Her research makes use of atomistic simulations using the

Barcelona Supercomputing Center The Barcelona Supercomputing Center ( es, Centro Nacional de Supercomputación) is a public research center located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It hosts MareNostrum, a 13.7 Petaflops, Intel Xeon Platinum-based supercomputer, which also include ...

to understand the fundamental mechanisms that underpin

heterogeneous catalysis In chemistry, heterogeneous catalysis is catalysis where the phase of catalysts differs from that of the reactants or products. The process contrasts with homogeneous catalysis where the reactants, products and catalyst exist in the same phase. Ph ...

. She looks to design more efficient, selective and sustainable materials for heterogeneous catalysis, with a focus in improving selectivity and gold catalysis. In 2015 she was awarded the

Prize for Excellence in 2015. She used heterogeneous catalysis to develop new materials for

artificial sweeteners A sugar substitute is a food additive that provides a sweetness like that of sugar while containing significantly less food energy than sugar-based sweeteners, making it a zero-calorie () or low-calorie sweetener. Artificial sweeteners may be d ...

, using renewable and low-cost products such as

arabinose Arabinose is an aldopentose – a monosaccharide containing five carbon atoms, and including an aldehyde (CHO) functional group. For biosynthetic reasons, most saccharides are almost always more abundant in nature as the "D"-form, or structurally ...

. She showed that it is possible to rearrange sugar atoms using a

molybdenum Molybdenum is a chemical element with the symbol Mo and atomic number 42 which is located in period 5 and group 6. The name is from Neo-Latin ''molybdaenum'', which is based on Ancient Greek ', meaning lead, since its ores were confused with lea ...

catalyst and a

ruthenium Ruthenium is a chemical element with the Symbol (chemistry), symbol Ru and atomic number 44. It is a rare transition metal belonging to the platinum group of the periodic table. Like the other metals of the platinum group, ruthenium is inert to ...

catalysed hydrogenation step. López has performed computational studies to determine the materials and experimental conditions that can improve the efficiency of water electrolysers; devices used for

water splitting Water splitting is the chemical reaction in which water is broken down into oxygen and hydrogen: :2 H2O → 2 H2 + O2 Efficient and economical water splitting would be a technological breakthrough that could underpin a hydrogen economy, base ...

. In these electrolysers the oxidation of water takes place close to the anode, which conventionally presents a bottleneck to device operation. At this electrode, two oxygen atoms come together to form oxygen gas, which requires a precise alignment of electron spins. By placing a magnet (nickel zinc ferrite) close to the anode, her group were able to show that the evolution of oxygen, and the associated production of hydrogen, could be achieved at low potentials, saving considerable amounts of energy. It is understood that this occurs because the magnetic layer acts to align electron spins close to the anode, which controls the spin state of the electrons in oxygen, ensuring that the spins are correctly aligned for the formation of an oxygen-oxygen bond. For the reaction she used earth-abundant catalysts, including nickel and iron. The magnet required to double hydrogen output cost less than $10.

Selected publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lopez, Nuria Living people Year of birth missing (living people) University of Barcelona alumni Academic staff of the Technical University of Denmark Spanish women chemists