Jesús Santamaría, Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Zaragoza, elected foreign member of the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Science et Lettere
Professor Jesús Santamaría, Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Zaragoza, has been elected foreign member of the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Science et Lettere, in its division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences, Chemistry section. This institution was originally founded by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797, as the National Institute of the Cisalpine Republic, in charge of collecting discoveries and perfecting the arts and sciences, following the model of the Institut de France. Napoleon himself appointed the first members of the Istituto and its first president, Alessandro Volta.
Today the Istituto Lombardo is an agency of the Italian Ministry of Culture based in the Palazzo di Brera, and has maintained its founding task of contributing to “matters relating to education and public welfare. It currently carries out a wide-ranging programme of activities, including support for research in the institution’s fields of activity, numerous events and public lectures, as well as its own publications and the management of its famous archive and library.
Members who have belonged to the Istituto Lombardo include Napoleon and Volta, the poet Vincenzo Monti, the writer and politician Alessandro Manzoni, the philosopher Carlo Cattaneo and the cleric Achille Ratti, the future Pope Pius XI, as well as several Nobel Prize winners: Camillo Golgi (Medicine), Giosuè Carducci (Literature), Giulio Natta (Chemistry) and Eugenio Montale (Literature).
370 published articles, 35 doctoral theses supervised, 26 patents and participation in 18 European projects, including two of the prestigious Advanced Grants of the European Research Council (ERC), endorse Santamaría’s long and profuse career in the academic and scientific field. Santamaría is the Principal Investigator of the NFP (Nanostructured Films and Particles) research group, and belongs to the Instituto de Nanociencia y Materiales de Aragón (INMA), a joint CSIC-UNIZAR centre, the Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria Aragón (IIS Aragón), and the Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Bioingeniería, Biomateriales y Nanomedicina (CIBER-BBN).
His current research topics include the development of new methods for the synthesis of nanomaterials, and applications of synthesised materials in medicine, photoassisted catalysis, microwave catalysis, molecular recognition sensing and nanosafety.
Santamaría has been director of the Samca Nanotechnology Chair, deputy director of the Institute of Nanoscience of Aragon (INA) at UNIZAR and editor of the Chemical Engineering Journal. He has done postdoctoral research at the University of Notre Dame and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), both in the United States.
11/07/2023
