Climent, Claudia

Clàudia Climent is a Beatriz Galindo Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Physical Chemistry at the Universitat de Barcelona (UB). She holds a BSc in Chemistry (2012, UB), a MSc in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry (2013, Universitat Rovira i Virgili) and a BSc in Physics (2020, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). In 2017 she completed her PhD in Nanoscience at UB under the supervision of Profs. David Casanova and Pere Alemany. By means of electronic structure calculations she investigated the photophysics of molecules and aggregates relevant to optoelectronic applications, including charge-transfer dyes and iridium(III) complexes. In 2016 she conducted a research stay in the group of Prof. Mario Barbatti at the Institut de Chimie Radicalaire (Aix Marseille Université) to explore the dynamics side of the problem through semiclassical nonadiabatic excited-state simulations.

After completing her PhD, she joined the group of Dr. Johannes Feist in the Department of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, working as a postdoctoral researcher for four years (2017-2021), where she continued her research on light-matter interactions but from a very different perspective, drawing on disciplines such as quantum optics and plasmonics. During this period she worked in the field of polaritonic chemistry, aiming to understand how the formation of hybrid light-matter states called polaritons can modify chemical reactivity and excited-state dynamics in the strong (light-matter) coupling regime. In 2018 she carried out a research stay in the group of Prof. Gerrit Groenhof at the Nanoscience Center of the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) to learn about multiscale molecular simulations of polariton relaxation. In 2021, she received the Emerging Scientific Talent Award from the Societat Catalana de Química for her postdoctoral research contributions.

In 2021 she moved to the US, where she joined the groups of Profs. Joseph Subotnik and Abraham Nitzan at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) in the beautiful city of Philadelphia. She spent three years in the US, initially funded by the Vagelos Institute for Energy, Science and Technology at Penn as a Vagelos postdoctoral fellow, and later as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow. During this period she continued her research on molecular polaritonics and began exploring chiral light-matter interactions. By the end of 2024 she started her new position as an Assistant Professor at UB, where her current research interests span different topics in the realm of light-matter interactions, including molecular polaritonics, plasmonics, and chirality-related phenomena.

Staff

Beatriz Galindo Researcher