Born in Barcelona in 1970, Prof. Víctor Franco Puntes studied chemical engineering at the Louis Pasteur University (Strasbourg, France) and chemistry at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain), graduating in 1994. He obtained his PhD in Physics at the University of Barcelona (1998), working on Giant Magnetoresistance in granular alloys. Then he spent more than 3 years in Berkeley (California, USA) as a postdoc, first in the group of Prof. Krishnan Kannan (National Center for Electron Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory) and then in the group of Prof. Paul Alivisatos (College of Chemistry, UC Berkeley). In 2003 he obtained a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship and worked in the Physics Dep. at the University of Barcelona. In 2005, he moves to the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology (ICN - now ICN2) as ICREA Research Professor and creates the Inorganic Nanoparticles Group. Since December 2014 he holds a double affiliation ICN2 and VHIR.

Research interests

Prof. Víctor Puntes works on the synthesis, characterisation and applications of engineered inorganic nanoparticles (NPs). By controlling the size, structure and shape of the inorganic core, and manipulating the linking of organic molecules to the nanoparticle surface, the group aims to design nanoparticles that interact with a variety of systems (biological, medical, materials, etc.). This allows for the deliberate modification of these systems, or the use of NPs for witnessing and reporting things.