About me!

I received my Hons M.Sc in Optical and imaging technologies in 2012 from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (Spain). After graduating, I started my career in industry working as an optical design and quality control engineer for several companies such as Escribano Mechanical & Engineering or Greenlight Solutions. During this period, I was involved in the design, tolerancing, and testing of imaging and non-imaging systems operating in the VIS-NIR, MWIR and LWIR for fusion energy diagnostics, as well as for industrial and defence applications.

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After spending some years in industry, I started to feel the need for acquiring new knowledge and skills, fact that pushed me to move from industry to academia, and pursue a fully founded 4-year PhD programme at the centre for Metamaterials Research and Innovation - University of Exeter (UK) in 2015.  This turning point gave me the opportunity taste the flavour of academia for the first time, and jump from classical optics towards other fascinating scientific fields, such as nanophotonics, material characterisation, nanofabrication techniques or computational electromagnetism. In particular, my PhD thesis (supervised by Profs. C. David Wright and Jacopo Bertolotti) was dedicated to the design, understanding, fabrication and characterisation of reconfigurable optical metasurfaces enabled by chacogenide phase-change alloys. Such materials have been traditionally employed in optical and electronic solid state memories thanks to their high electro-optical contrast between their (solid) amorphous and crystalline states, as well as their long-term cyclability between phases. 

 

After defending my PhD thesis in November 2019,  I started to work as a postdoctoral research associate (postdoctoral research fellow since March 2021) at the Nano Engineering Science and Technology group, under the supervision of Prof. C. David Wright. During this period, I worked for two European and UK-national projects highly related to my PhD topic. In July 2021, after some initial collaborations with Profs. Jan Siegel and Rosalia Serna, I decided to move to the Institue of Optics (Laser Processing Group) with a 6-month postdoctoral contract, and  shortly after I was awarded with a Margarita Salas Postdoctoral Fellowship (started in January 2022 -CA1/RSUE/2021-00829-), and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (METASCALE, 101068089), which I recently started (September 2023). My main goals during implementation of METASCALE will be to i) learn new skills based on material laser processing techniques, and ii) study their potential and limitations as suitable alternatives to conventional lithographic processes, towards the realisation of high throughput, low-cost optical metasurfaces and nanophotonic devices.

 

Out of my research, I like to play videogames (especially moba and strategy genres), travelling,  music, drawing, and graphical arts. I also love animals, and live with two cats, Daga and Kunai :)