Stefan Bromley (1971) heads the Nanoclusters and Nanostructured Materials (www.ub.edu/nnmgroup) group within the Institute of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry at the University of Barcelona (IQTC-UB). He obtained his PhD in Computational Physics (University of Southampton, UK) in 1997 and has held research posts in the UK (Postdoctoral fellow, Royal Institution), the Netherlands (Associate Professor, Delft University of Technology) and Spain (Ramón y Cajal fellow, UB). He has published >170 WoS-listed articles and 8 book chapters, which have received >5500 citations (h-index = 36). He has given many invited talks about his work at international conferences and academic institutions and has co-edited two books and co-authored two reviews on computational modelling of nanoparticles and nanomaterials.

Research interests

With the constant technological drive for device miniaturisation, materials are increasingly being used at scales of only a few 100s or 1000s of atoms (i.e. the nanoscale). Such nanomaterials often display novel size-dependent properties compared to materials at everyday length scales. Employing classical atomistic and quantum chemical modelling methods implemented on powerful supercomputers, we aim to provide a detailed predictive understanding of the structural, electronic and chemical properties of nanomaterials. Our focus is on how nanomaterials evolve with increasing size, and designing new materials from nanoscale building blocks. Our research follows three main themes: (i) nanoclusters and nanostructured materials for energy applications (e.g TiO₂, ZnO), (ii) nucleation and properties of astronomically important nanomaterials (e.g. TiC, silicates), and (iii) design of nanostructured materials for electronics/spintronics using organic molecular building blocks .