Dr. Albert Rimola graduated in Chemistry at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB, 2002) and got a PhD in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry (UAB, 2007) under the supervision of Prof. M. Sodupe and Dr. L. Rodríguez-Santiago. During the PhD period he did different visits at foreign laboratories. He developed a post-doctoral work in the group of Prof. Piero Ugliengo (Univ. Turin, 2007-2009), and in 2010 he returned to UAB obtaining several grants and contracts through competitive international calls. He is currently a Ramón y Cajal researcher in UAB. He has been Invited Professor at Univ. Cergy-Pontoise (Prof. F Dulieu group, 1 month 2016) and at Univ. Grenoble Alpes (Prof. C. Ceccarelli group, 3 months 2017).
The research focus of Dr. A. Rimola has always been on modeling chemical processes by accurate quantum chemical calculations using both molecular and periodic ab initio approaches. His PhD was devoted to the metal-ion/biomolecule gas phase chemistry, in which quantum chemical calculations were essential to interpret the complex outcome of mass spectrometry experiments. During this period, he acquired a very good knowledge of different quantum mechanical methods for the treatment of open-shell systems and gained experience in the simulation of chemical reactivity. During his post-doc, Dr. A. Rimola studied the electronic structure of different solid-state extended systems and of their adsorptive and chemical reactivity properties, getting deep experience in the modeling of surfaces of different nature; e.g., ionic/covalent, crystalline/amorphous, defective, etc. The expertise of Dr. Rimola is thus on the simulation of chemical reactivity and modeling of complex surfaces and his current research activity merges and exploits these two skills, which are of great interest in several fields like heterogeneous- and nano-catalysis, surface science or biomaterials. His current research lines focus on the modeling of processes related to the primordial chemical evolution (i.e. astrochemistry and prebiotic chemistry), in which solid state matter plays an important role. Related to this subject, Dr. A. Rimola is the PI of an ERC 2019 Consolidator Grant (Quantum Chemistry on Interstellar Grains, QUANTUMGRAIN, grant agreement number 865657), the UAB PI of a 2018 Marie-Curie ITN project (AstroChemical Origins, ACO, grant agreement number 811312), and co-PI of a national plan research project (CTQ2017-89132-P). He regularly has access to the supercomputational resources provided by the RES.
He holds several international collaborations with quantum chemists (Prof. P. Ugliengo, Univ. Turin; Prof. J. Kästner, Univ. Stuttgart), experimentalists (Prof. F. Dulieu, Univ. Cergy-Pontoise, Dr. P. Theulé, Univ. Marseille Prof. G. Martra, Univ. Turin) and astronomers (Prof. C. Ceccarelli, Univ. Grenoble Alpes; Prof. P. Caselli, MPE-MPI; Dr. J.M. Trigo-Rodríguez, ICE-CSIC).
Since 2004, Dr. A. Rimola has coauthored 83 international peer-reviewed articles, 5 reviews and 6 book chapters, and has given 25 invited talks in international congresses and advanced schools. He is also involved in activities of dissemination science giving popular science conferences and coauthoring popular science articles.
Dr. A. Rimola received the award of outstanding PhD thesis in the doctorate program of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry (course 2006/07), the European Doctorate Mention award, and holds the Accreditation of Advanced Research provided by AQU.
