Ramón Álvarez-Puebla

Ramón Álvarez-Puebla

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

Ramón Álvarez Puebla is an ICREA Research Professor at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili and the Center for Chemical Technology of Catalonia, both in Tarragona. He studied Chemistry at the Universidad de Navarra and got his PhD from the Universidad Pública de Navarra in Surface Science. In 2004 he joined the group of Ricardo Aroca at the University of Windsor (Canada) where he remained in a cross appointment with the General Motors Research and Development center until the end of 2005. In 2006, Dr Álvarez was promoted to Research Officer at the National Center for Nanotechnology (NINT) belonging to the National Research Council of Canada. In 2008 he moved to Spain at the Universidad de Vigo, Spain. He joined ICREA in October of 2012.

Research interests

Dr. Álvarez-Puebla is an expert in surface science and spectroscopy with emphasis on the fabrication and characterization of plasmonic particles and their integration into advanced "all optical" sensing devices for biomedicine, chemical biology and environmental monitoring. Currently he is interested in: - Design and development of plasmonic functional materials and their integration into real live "all optical" sensors. - Development of new technologies for pathogen/disease marker detection by using localized surface plasmon resonances, Raman and SERS. - In vivo intracellular monitoring and imaging of relevant cytoplasm metabolites under different conditions (health/disease). - Optical technologies for the ultrafast and ultrasensitive recognition of active compounds in combinatorial libraries.

Selected publications

- Mariño-López A, Alvarez-Puebla RA, Vaz B, Correa-Duarte MA & Pérez-Lorenzo M 2022, 'SERS optical accumulators as unified nanoplatforms for tear sampling and sensing in soft contact lenses', Nanoscale, 14(22):7991-7999.

- Turino M, Carbó-Argibay E, Correa-Duarte M, Guerrini L, Pazos-Perez N & Alvarez-Puebla RA* 2022, 'Design and fabrication of bimetallic plasmonic colloids through cold nanowelding', Nanoscale, 14, 9439-9447.

- Turino M, Alvarez-Puebla RA & Guerrini L 2022, 'Plasmonic Azobenzene Chemoreporter for Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Detection of Biothiols', Biosensors-basel, 12, 5, 267.

- I.B. Becerril-Castro, I. Calderon, N. Pazos-Perez, L. Guerrini, F. Schulz, N. Feliu, I. Chakraborty, V. Giannini, W.J. Parak, R.A. Alvarez-Puebla,* Optical, synthetic and SERS analytical properties of gold nanostars  Analysis & Sensing, (2022) e202200005(1 of 16) (https://doi.org/10.1002/anse.202200005)

- Xiao X, Turino MC, Becerril-Castro IB, Maier SA, Alvarez-Puebla RA* & Giannini V* 2022, 'Extraordinarily Transparent Metaldielectrics for Infrared and Terahertz Applications', Adv. Photonics Res., 3, 2200190.

- Becerril-Castro IB, Calderon I, Ockova J, Liebel M, van Hulst NF, Giannini V & Alvarez-Puebla RA* 2022,'Direct Modular Printing of Plasmonic Chemosensors' ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces, 14, 51, 57165–57170.

- Turino M, Pazos-Perez N, Guerrini L & Alvarez-Puebla RA 2022, 'Positively-charged plasmonic nanostructures for SERS sensing applications', RSC Adv, 12(2):845-859.

- Liebel M, Calderon I, Pazos-Perez N, van Hulst NF & Alvarez-Puebla RA 2022, 'Widefield SERS for High-Throughput Nanoparticle Screening', Angew Chem Int Ed Engl, 61(20):e202200072.