Dr. Maria Gimenez is Principal Investigator at CiQUS (University of Santiago de Composterla) and Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham.

In 2006 she received her PhD from the University of Valencia working under the supervision of Prof. Eugenio Coronado on multifunctional materials of interest in molecular magnetism. She then joined the Supramolecular Chemistry and Chemical Nanosciences Group of Prof. Neil Champness at the University of Nottingham working as postdoctoral research fellow for almost three years. In 2009 she was awarded with a two-year Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship in the Nanocarbon Group of Prof. Andrei Khlobystov.

In 2011, she started her independent career as Royal Society Research Fellow and in 2015 she became Assistant Professor of Materials Chemistry in Nottingham. In February 2018, she joined the CiQUS, launching her project ERC-STG "NANOCOMP"(link is external). In 2012 she was awarded with a very prestigious prize (Emerging Investigator Award 2012) by the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry for outstanding and novel research. In two consecutive years (2016 & 2017) she became Emerging Talent SRUK/CERU Award finalist for the impact of her studies on the development of materials chemistry using carbon nanostructures.

Dr. Gimenez has carried out a number of relevant works with hybrid metal-carbon nanostructures, and her research is focused on the development and functional characterisation of hybrid nanostructures for spintronics and energy-related applications, e.g., assembling magnetic, electrical and electrochemical active nanoswitches within carbon nano-containers, as well as developing a general synthetic methodology for the confinement of molecules, clusters and nanoparticles.