Dr. Juan Daniel Prades García (Barcelona, 1982) is Degree in Physics (2005) and in Electronic Engineering (2009), Master in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (2007), and Doctor (2nd February 2009) by the University of Barcelona.

In February 2009, was hired postdoctoral researcher at the Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC). Later he won several  professor positions in the Department of Electronics of the University of Barcelona, where he works until now.as. He has supervised 25 Degree and Master Theses, as well as 5 Doctorate Thesis.

Since his first paper in 2007, his publication metrics are: 82 JCR journal papers, average impact factor 5.7, more than 2200 citations, h-index = 26. This activity has allowed him to establish my own research group of 13 people (10 PhD students, 2 PostDoc, 1 Business Developer), which is currently funded by 5 ongoing projects (1.2 million Euros, on top of the ERC funding) obtained in the last couple of years.

Research interests

My research domain is sensor technology, with focus on chemical and gas sensors. In the last 5 years I have centered my activities in addressing two of the main challenges in these field: lowering the power consumption and improving the selectivity of the response towards specific molecular compounds. This topic, and the strategies that I have followed, have been supported by the European Research Council with a Starting Grant. As outcomes of this main activity I have developed:

• a new gas sensor principle offering zero-power operation,
• two systematic strategies to lower the power consumption of existing technologies more than 3 orders of magnitude: the self-heating operation and the microLED technology,
• improved the specificity towards selected gases by more than 2000%,
• a new ultra-low-cost sensor concept based on printed disposable sensors and smartphone cameras.

Keywords

sensors, micro and nano devices, low power, selective chemical/gas sensors, low-cost chemical/gas sensors