Prats, Hector
Lecturer
Catalysis, energy and environment
Hector Prats obtained his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Barcelona (Spain) in 2019 under the supervision of Ramón Sayós and Francesc Illas. His doctoral research focused on the development and application of Monte Carlo-based methods for heterogeneous catalysis and gas separation. During his Ph.D., he also carried out a research stay in the group of Karsten Reuter at the Technical University of Munich (Germany), working under the supervision of Mie Andersen (2017).
From 2020 to 2021, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the group of Jens K. Nørskov at the Technical University of Denmark, under the supervision of Karen Chan, where he investigated electrocatalytic processes for sustainable hydrogen production. He subsequently received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship and joined the group of Michail Stamatakis, first at University College London (2021–2023) and later at the University of Oxford (2024). During this period, he worked on the rational design of carbide-based catalysts for CO2 and CH4 conversion and developed a novel algorithm to accelerate Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations. In 2024, he was awarded an ESPRIT Fellowship and joined the group of Aleix Comas-Vives at the Vienna University of Technology, where he worked from 2024 to 2026 on understanding support effects in MXene-based materials.
In 2026, he returned to the University of Barcelona as a Lecturer in the Department of Materials Science and Physical Chemistry. His current research focuses on the development of computational methods to study catalyst evolution and reaction kinetics, as well as the design of advanced catalytic materials for sustainable chemical processes. He has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications and has an h-index of 20.