Invited Talk by Amparo Ruiz Carretero on Supramolecular Chiral Electronics (November 23)

On Monday, November 23, Amparo Ruiz Carretero, ATRAE Senior Researcher at the Institute of Materials Science of Madrid (ICMM-CSIC), will give an invited talk at BCMaterials entitled ‘Twist and bond: beyond structural effects in supramolecular (chiro)electronics’. It will take place in the Martina Casiano auditorium, on the University of the Basque Country’s science campus in Leioa, at 11:00, and will also be available online via Teams.

Organic materials are promising for sustainable electronics: they are flexible, lightweight and scalable, and their properties can be tailored through molecular design. Their efficiency, however, still lags behind that of inorganic materials. The talk will present two strategies to improve charge transport in organic devices. The first introduces hydrogen-bonding units into small semiconductor molecules, creating linear pathways that boost the mobility and lifetime of charge carriers. The second incorporates chiral (helical) structures to achieve selective transport of electron spin, exploiting the Chiral Induced Spin Selectivity (CISS) effect. This effect is key to chiro-spintronics, an emerging field with potential for data processing and storage and for energy technologies. The aim is to offer the materials science community molecular design and characterization tools for energy and digital technologies.

About the Speaker

Amparo Ruiz-Carretero studied chemistry and earned her PhD at the University of Castilla–La Mancha, with research stays at Eindhoven University of Technology. After postdoctoral work at Northwestern University and the University of Strasbourg, she obtained a CNRS position in 2015 at the Institut Charles Sadron, where she started her independent career, and received the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2023. In 2024 she secured an ATRAE project to join CSIC, where her group studies supramolecular chirality and spin selectivity for energy-related technologies.