Dr. Albert Solé-Daura

Albert Solé-Daura obtained his PhD from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV, Tarragona, Spain) in January of 2020, under the supervision of Prof. Jorge J. Carbó and Prof. Josep M. Poblet. His doctoral studies included four months as a visitor in the group of Prof. Jonathan D. Hirst at the University of Nottingham (U.K.).

Following a brief postdoctoral period at URV, he moved to the group of Dr. Caroline Mellot-Draznieks at Collège de France (Paris, France) where he spent 18 months as a Postdoctoral Researcher.

In 2022, he received a Margarita Salas Grant, funded by the European NextGeneration EU program, which financed his postdoctoral research for a two-years period. He spent the first year at the Van ‘t Hoff Institute of Molecular Sciences (University of Amsterdam, UvA, The Netherlands) in the group of Dr. Bernd Ensing, and then returned to Spain to work at the URV during the second year.

In 2024, he joined the group of Prof. Feliu Maseras at Institut Català d’Investigació Química (ICIQ, Spain) as a Postdoctoral Researcher. Shortly after, he secured a “la Caixa” Junior Leader Fellowship to initiate his independent research career at ICIQ.

His research interests mainly concern the application of computational methods and techniques to investigate structural, dynamic properties and reactivity of Polyoxometalates (POMs) and Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) and how they link to their roles in energy- and sustainability-related catalytic processes. These include photo- and electrochemical strategies for CO2 conversion, N2 and proton reduction, as well as thermal oxidation catalysis for the synthesis of chemical commodities using environmentally-friendly oxidants. Besides, he is highly interested in the computational modeling of complex phenomena, such as proton- and electron-transfer events in solution, by means of advanced molecular simulation methods in combination with enhanced sampling techniques.