Team

Principal Investigator: 

Assist. Prof. Dr. Maria Ibáñez

Office: I21.O3.203
E-mail: mibanez@ist.ac.at
Phone: +43 (0)2243 9000-2116

Maria Ibáñez was born in La Sénia (Spain). She graduated in physics at the University of Barcelona, where she also obtained her PhD in 2013. Her PhD thesis was qualified Excellent Cum Laude and awarded with the Honors Doctorate by the University of Barcelona. Her PhD research was funded by a Spanish competitive grant (FPU) which supported her to conduct short-term research stays in cutting-edge laboratories. In particular she worked at CEA Grenoble (2009), the University of Chicago (2010), the California Institute of Technology (2011), the Cornell University (2012) and the Northwestern University (2013). In 2014, she joined the group of Prof. Dr. Kovalenko at ETH Zürich and EMPA as a research fellow where in 2017 she received the Ružička Prize. In September 2018 she became an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) at IST Austria and started the Functional Nanomaterials group.

Maria Ibáñez’s Google Scholar

Project Technician:

Dr. Magali Lorion

Office: I21.O3.202
E-mail: magali.lorion@ist.ac.at
Phone: +43 (0)2243 9000-2117

Magali was born in France. She first studied Chemical Engineering at the École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Lille in her native France. She received her PhD in Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry in 2007. She then worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the group of Nicholas J. Westwood at St. Andrews University, U. K. then at the Institute of Organic and Analytical Chemistry at the University of Orléans, France. She has experience in heterocyclic and medicinal chemistry as well as in multistep synthesis. She then joined in 2016 the company Greenpharma in Orléans, France as a medicinal chemistry manager to develop hemisynthesis and bioisosteres of natural compounds scaffolds. She joined the Ibáñez group in November 2020 as a project technician.

PostDocs:

Dr. Yu Liu

Office: I21.O3.204
E-mail: yu.liu@ist.ac.at
Phone: +43 (0)2243 9000-2117

Yu Liu was born in Anhui province (China) in 1988. He received his Master’s degree in Applied Chemistry from Anhui University, China in 2014. Then, he started his PhD studies in Nanoscience at the University of Barcelona (UB)-Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC) under the supervision of Prof. A. Cabot and Prof. D. Cadavid in Barcelona (Spain), and received his PhD degree in July, 2018. In October, 2018 he joined the Ibáñez group as postdoc. His research focuses on the bottom-up engineering of chalcogenide nanostructures for high performance thermoelectric materials.

Yu Liu’s Google Scholar

Dr. Cheng Chang

Office: I21.O3.204
E-mail: cheng.chang@ist.ac.at
Phone: +43(0)0677-63501888

Cheng Chang was born in China in 1992. He received his BE degree in Materials Science and Engineering from Beihang University in 2014. He joined Li-Dong Zhao’s group in 2014 as a Master’s student and received his Ph.D. degree in July 2019. In October 2019 he joined the Ibáñez group as a postdoc. His research focuses on bottom-up engineering of tin chalcogenide for thermoelectric applications.

 

Cheng’s Google Scholar

 

Office: I21.O3.205
E-mail: daniel.balazs@ist.ac.at

Phone: +43 (0)2243 9000-2117

Daniel Balazs was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1989. He first studied Chemical Engineering at the Budapest University of Technology in his native Hungary. He received his PhD cum laude in Nanoscience from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands under the supervision of Prof. Maria Antonietta Loi in 2018. He then worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the group of Prof. Tobias Hanrath at Cornell University, focusing on nanocrystal self-assembly. He joined the Ibáñez group in September 2020. Daniel has been working on nanocrystals, surface chemistry, self-assembly, and optical and electronic properties of hierarchically structured matter. He likes to describe his work as ‘playing with atomic-sized Legos’ – and the headache caused by the complexity of these systems is just as painful as stepping on those little plastic pieces.

PhD Students:

Mariano Calcabrini

Office: I21.O3.204
E-mail: mariano.calcabrini@ist.ac.at
Phone: +43 (0)2243 9000-2117

Mariano Calcabrini was born in Quilmes, Argentina. He graduated in Chemical Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires in 2017. During his Master he worked in sol-gel processing of silica gels and nanoparticles. In March 2019 he joined Ibáñez’s group as a PhD candidate studying thin film thermoelectrics and surface chemistry.

 

 

Tobias Kleinhanns

Office: I21.O3.205
E-mail: tobias.kleinhanns@ist.ac.at
Phone: +43 (0)2243 9000-2117

Tobias Kleinhanns was born in Nuremberg, Germany. He graduated in Materials Science from the University of Stuttgart, Germany. In 2019, he received a master’s degree also in Materials Science from the University of Stuttgart. During his Master’s Thesis he worked on the synthesis and characterization of heterostructured nanowires. Subsequently, he joined the graduate school of the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria as a Ph.D candidate and affiliated with the Ibañez group in June 2020.

 

Seungho Lee

Office: I21.O3.204
E-mail: seungho.lee@ist.ac.at
Phone: +43 (0)2243 9000-2117

Seungho Lee was born in South Korea. He graduated in Material Science and Engineering from Kookmin University. He received a master’s degree in Energy Science and Engineering from Daegu Kyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) in 2016. The topic was the synthesis and characterization of nanocrystals for energy devices. In April 2019 he joined the Ibáñez group. His research focuses on the synthesis of nanostructures for catalytic applications.

 

Sergi Sànchez Ribot

Office: I21.O3.204
E-mail: sergi.sanchez@ist.ac.at
Phone: +43 (0)2243 9000-2117

Sergi Sanchez Ribot was born in Lleida, Catalonia (Spain). He graduated in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology from University Autonoma of Barcelona (UAB). Later on he obtained an european joint master’s degree in Materials for Energy Storage and Conversion, in which he was granted the possibility to take courses in different universities accross Europe, as Universitée Jules Verne de Picardie (France), University Polytechnica of Warsaw (Poland) and in Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), where he realize his master thesis on Redox Mediators for Li-S batteries. He joined the Ibañez group in the beginning of 2020 to investigate the thermoelectrical properties of colloidal self-assembled nanocrystals in superlattices.

Christine Fiedler

Office: I21.O3.204
E-mail: christine.fiedler@ist.ac.at
Phone: +43 (0)2243 9000-2117

Christine Fiedler was born in Barbados and is also Austrian. She graduated in 2016 from the University of the West Indies Cave Hill, Barbados, with First Class Honours in Chemistry with Biochemistry. She received her masters degree in 2020 from the Johannes Kepler University in Linz Austria in Polymer Chemistry. Her work focused on the synthesis and engineering of Janus micro/nanomotors and nanoparticle synthesis. Christine started her Ph.D studies in September 2020 and joined the Ibañez group to work on the processing of thermoelectric materials by solution methods. 

 

Scientific interns:

Anna Smirnova

Office: I21.O3.202
E-mail: anna.smirnova@duke.edu
Phone: +43 (0)2243 9000-2117

Anna Smirnova was born in Charleston, SC. She currently is working towards a B.S. in Chemistry at Duke University. Anna joined the group as a summer intern in 2021.

 

Name	Year	Position in the group	Current position
Marian Janik	2019	Rotation Student	PhD student in Katsaros Group (IST)
Yu Zhang	2019	Visiting Student	PhD student at IREC
Wei Tan	2019	Summer Intern	Bachelor student at Imperial College
Guillem Montaña Mora	2019	Visiting Student	PhD student in IREC
Doğukan Hazar Apaydın	2019-2020	Postdoc	Postdoc TU Wien
Juan Carlos Sobarzo Ponce	2019	Rotation Student	PhD student in Waitukaitis Group (IST)
Maximilian Ritter	2020	Summer Intern	PhD student at ETH Zurich
Anna-Maria Fuchsberger	2020	Summer Intern	Student at TU Wien
Christoph Bartmann	2020	Summer Intern	Student at TU Wien
Alwin Meledeth	2020	Master student	OMV company
Sajal Naduvile Thadathil	2021	Rotation Student	Rotation Student (IST)
Shiva Safari	2021	Rotation Student	PhD student in Modic Group (IST)
Soumyadip Mondal	2021	Rotation Student	PhD student in Freunberger Group (IST)
Kemal Yorulmaz	2021	Intern