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Irene Suarez-Martinez

Institute: IMN Nantes

Role in nano²hybrids project: Computer Modelling

E-mail:

I am one of the youngest one in the project. I have just finished my thesis and this is my first post-doc.

I am originally from Madrid. My parents and my brother live there, in a town/city called Fuenlabrada. I like cinema and shopping. Being "shopping addict" has two main problems (some people would say that there are more but I am an optimist!): money and traveling. I am not too worried about the first one because I like to look for bargains! But being a scientist involves a lot of traveling and it has been a bit of a problem to move all my shoes and handbags from Spain to UK and from UK to France :-)

I did my degree in Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Chemistry (Licenciatura en Quimicas). I always wanted to take an Erasmus year and I decided to take it for the last year of my degree. In science not many people ask for it so it was kind of easy to get it. I decided to go to Brighton (UK). I only spoke english so I had to go to an english-speaker country. I chose Brighton because it had beach and, as I am from Madrid, I thought it would be nice to live in a beach-place. I must say I was disappointed when I first saw the huge rocks in Brighton beach (silly me! expecting sandy beaches!). During that year I worked in a project with Prof. Malcolm Heggie and a PhD (at that time, now a Dr.) Natalia Martsinovich. I modelled the addition of hydrogen in the (100) plane of silicon.

I loved the research, the city, the people and even the beach so much that I decided to do a PhD with Macolm Heggie. So I spent three and half more years there. I worked in modelling of boron and dislocations in graphite (the layered "brother" of the nanotubes). My PhD was sponsored by British Energy, it is an electrical company which has nuclear reactor around UK. Graphite is used in some nuclear reactors to slow down the neutrons but the collision with the neutrons damage the graphite. Me and others in the group were looking at how that damage "looks" atomistically.

When I was writing the thesis Chris suggested this position in Nantes and asked if I was interested. And I was! :-) I finally finished writing my thesis, which it took longer than I expected! I passed my viva and moved to France. My knowledge of french is limited - I would say non existent but I took some lessons when I was in UK. But I hope to catch up some bites soon.

So, basically everything is new but somehow related to me:
- new topic: carbon nanotubes (but I hope the knowledge of graphite will help)
- new country: France (hopefully more similar to the spanish life)
- new language: french (let' s wait to see how that one turns out!)

Key Publications:
- Theory of diffusion and plasticity in carbon layered materials. DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex, UK (2007)
- I. Suarez-Martinez, A. A. El-Barbary, G. Savini, and M. I. Heggie First-Principles Simulations of Boron Diffusion in Graphite, Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 015501 (2007)
- J. M. Campanera, G. Savini, I. Suarez-Martinez, M. I. Heggie. Density functional calculations on the intricacies of the Moiré patterns. Phys. Rev. B 75, 235449 (2007)
- I. Suarez-Martinez, G. Savini, G. Haffenden, J.-M. Campanera and M.I. Heggie, Dislocations of Burgers vector c/2 in Graphite. Phys. Stat. Sol. (C) 4, no.8, 2958-2962 (2007)

Latest Posts

Irene Suarez-Martinez	TwirlMol
	Just a quick note about an awesome javascript to put structures in your websites: TwistyMol And here some example related to the n2h project (more or less) -feel free to rotate and zoom-in/out using your mouse! Benzene, the molecule we want to detect: by simply writing in your web-source: < div id="benzene" height="200" width="200"> < script src="http://cactus.nci.nih.gov/chemical/structure/benzene/twirl?div_id=benzene" type="text/javascript"> Also, you can use InChI format to ... see full text
7.36am, Wednesday 24th Feb 2010 | |
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Irene Suarez-Martinez	Article from Nano2hybrids project
	toggle size What? you couldn't copy the DOI number?, try here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0957-4484/20/37/375501 show / hide video
5.19pm, Monday 14th Sep 2009 | |
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Irene Suarez-Martinez	Chris and Irene are not available
	toggle size Away from today until the 21st June show / hide video
2.21pm, Friday 12th Jun 2009 | |
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Irene Suarez-Martinez	Nanoserie 5/5 Nanoformes de Carbone
	toggle size Cinquième video de la nanoserie sponsorisé par WomenInNano, nano2hybrids et Vega Science Trust. Découvre autres formes de carbone! Il y a la video en espagnol et anglais show / hide video
4.09pm, Tuesday 14th Apr 2009 | |
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Irene Suarez-Martinez	Nanoserie 4/5: Applications et propietes de les nanotubes de carbone
	toggle size Quatrième video de la nanoserie sponsorisé par WomenInNano, nano2hybrids et Vega Science Trust. Où les nanotubes de carbone sont ils utilisés? Il y a la video en anglais et espagnol show / hide video
3.29pm, Tuesday 14th Apr 2009 | |
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