Francesc Illas

Biography

Francesc Illas (FI) is a Full Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Barcelona where he is now the director of the Materials Science and Physical Chemistry department, previously he served as Director of IQTCUB from 2007 to 2018. He carried out his chemistry degree studies and Ph. D Thesis at the Universitat de Barcelona where he became a Full Professor of Physical Chemistry in 1992. He spent several periods at different research centers (IBM Almaden Research Center and Los Alamos National Laboratory) and has been invited professor at Universitá della Calabria (Cosenza, Italy) and Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris, France). He received the Distinguished Professor Mention for the Research Promotion awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2001, the Bruker Physical Chemistry Research Award of the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry in 2004, received the ICREA Academia Award in 2009 for the 2010-2014 and again in 2015 for the 2016-2020 period. He was elected Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences in 2009 and a Member of Academia Europea in 2017. In 2012 he joined the Editorial Board of Surface Science and of Theoretical Chemistry Accounts. In 2022 he was awarded the Medal of the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry, the highest distinction of this society. He is considered an international expert in the field of computational materials science where he made significant contributions in the description of magnetic coupling in molecules and solids, in the study of metal-support interactions in heterogenous catalysis, in modelling realistic nanoparticles, also related to catalysis, and in the rationalization of heterogeneously catalyzed reactions. He has coauthored over 650 papers, given more than 125 invited lectures, and received over 26000 citations ( h -index 79, source ISI WOS).