Department 1: Functional organic materials

The research in this multidisciplinary line is focused on the design, synthesis, processing and evaluation of new functional organic materials. The researchers involved in this line have wide experience in the preparation and study of functional molecules, supramolecular organizations and macromolecules, all of them designed to perform target functionalities. Taking advantage of this expertise, the current and future research of this line mainly deals with the study and development of novel materials with interest in the fields of Optics, Optoelectronics, Conductivity and Biomedicine.

Applications on these fields will be approached using three types of materials:

– Molecular materials that are designed to present nonlinear optical properties and other electronic properties inspired by biological systems. The key issue is the optimization of the molecular structure according to a feedback mechanism provided by the evaluation of the structure-properties relationship.

– Materials based on liquid crystals whose supramolecular organization is imposed by the final property. The development of such systems focuses on the design of molecular building blocks that self-organize into liquid crystal phases, which fulfil the structural requirements for the appareance of the target optical, optoelectronic or conductive properties.

– Polymeric materials with contyrolled molecular architecture (side-chain polymers, block-copolymers, dendrimers, photopolymers) which are processed by optical and thermal methods, in order to obtain micro- and nanostructured materials for optical or biomedical applications.