Ramón Álvarez-Puebla

Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV)

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

– Morla-Folch J, Alvarez-Puebla RA* & Guerrini L* 2016, “Direct Quantification of DNA Base Composition by Surface-enhanced Raman Scattering Spectroscopy”, The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 7, pp 3037–3041

– Torres-Nuñez A, Frauds K, Graham D, Alvarez-Puebla RA* & Guerrini L* 2016, “Silver Colloids as Plasmonic Substrates for Direct Label-free  Surface-enhanced Raman Scattering Analysis of DNA”, Analyst, 141, 5170-5180

– Guerrini L, Morla-Folch J, Gisbert-Quilis P, Xie H & Alvarez-Puebla RA 2016, ‘Label-free direct surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) of nucleic acids (Conference Presentation)’, Colloidal Nanoparticles For Biomedical Applications Xi, 9722, 97220O.

– Pazos E, Garcia-Algar M, Penas C, Nazarenus M, Torruella A, Pazos-Perez N, Guerrini L, Vazquez ME, Garcia-Rico E, Mascarenas JL & Alvarez-Puebla RA 2016, ‘Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Surface Selection Rules for the Proteomic Liquid Biopsy in Real Samples: Efficient Detection of the Oncoprotein c-MYC’, Journal Of The American Chemical Society, 138, 43, 14206 – 14209.

– Romo-Herrera JM, Gonzalez AL, Guerrini L, Castiello FR, Alonso-Nunez G, Contreras OE & Alvarez-Puebla RA* 2016, ‘Study of Depth and Size of Concave Cube Au Nanoparticles as Highly Sensitive SERS Probes’, Nanoscale, 8, 7326-7333.

– Morla-Folch J, Xie H, Alvarez-Puebla RA & Guerrini L 2016, ‘Fast Optical Chemical and Structural Classification of RNA’, Acs Nano, 10, 2, 2834 – 2842.

– Tebbe M, Lentz S, Guerrini L, Fery A, Alvarez-Puebla RA* & Pazos-Perez N* 2016, ‘Fabrication and optical enhancing properties of discrete supercrystals’, Nanoscale, 8, 25, 12702-12709

– Pazos-Perez N, Pazos E, Catala C, Mir-Simon B, Gomez-de Pedro S, Sagalés J, Villanueva C, Vila J, Soriano A, García de Abajo FJ* &  Alvarez-Puebla RA* 2016, ‘Ultrasensitive multiplex Optical quantification of bacteria in large samples of biofluids’, Scientific Reports, 6, 29014