José María Porro Appointed President of SETN

José María “Txema” Porro Azpiazu, an Ikerbasque Research Fellow and Ramón y Cajal researcher at BCMaterials, has been appointed the new president of the Spanish Society for Neutron Techniques (SETN). He succeeds María Teresa Fernández Díaz, a researcher at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France.

His appointment was announced during the SETN General Assembly, held as part of the 12th International Meeting of the Spanish Society for Neutron Techniques in Bilbao from 13 to 15 July.

A distinguished scientific career

Porro has built an outstanding career in the application of neutron techniques to the study of materials and their properties. He holds a PhD in Physics of Nanostructures and Advanced Materials from the University of the Basque Country (EHU), where he conducted his doctoral research at CIC nanoGUNE.

During his postdoctoral career, he worked at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source in the United Kingdom. In 2017, he joined BCMaterials through a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship. At the end of 2019, he became an Ikerbasque Research Fellow, a position he has combined with a Ramón y Cajal fellowship since 2024.

His current research focuses on the design and development of ferromagnetic shape-memory alloys subjected to different processing and modelling approaches, all-optical switching phenomena in magnetic multilayer thin films, and a new class of interacting magnetic materials known as artificial spin ices.

A strong connection to neutron science

Txema has extensive experience at large-scale neutron research facilities. He has conducted experiments at the ILL in France, the Budapest Neutron Centre in Hungary and ANSTO’s neutron research facilities in Australia, among others.

He has been a member of the SETN Board since 2022 and will now lead the organisation as its president. Alongside his participation in several scientific committees and societies, he is a member of ILL Subcommittee 5B.

He also participates, or has previously participated, in scientific panels evaluating proposals for access to neutron experiments at the ILL, SpINS—Spanish Initiatives for Neutron Scattering—ANSTO in Sydney, Australia, and the IBR-2 research reactor in Dubna, Russia.

BCMaterials congratulates Txema on his appointment and wishes him every success in his new role as president of SETN.