Alba Díaz-Lobo

PhD Students

I am currently carrying out my PhD thesis in the Micro and Nanotechnology Institute (IMN), which is part of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), at FINDER (FuntIonal Nanoscape Devices for EneRgy) group. The PhD program is Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. The main goal of my research is the development of metamaterials based on anodic aluminium oxide nanostructures for energy saving and harvesting, in particular, for passive radiative cooling applications. My main tasks are the fabrication of the alumina nanostructures following a two-step anodization process and the further preparation needed to nanostructurate other materials, such polymers; the morphological characterisation by scanning electron microscopy ( SEM); the optical characterisation, using UV-Vis-NIR and IR spectrophotometry as well as UV-Vis-NIR and IR ellipsometry; and the characterisation of the cooling performance, that includes indoor and outdoor measurements of temperature reductions as well as calculations of the cooling power. I have done a one-month stay at the Universidad de Cádiz (UCA) and I got a competitive national fellowship (iMove) to do a three-month stay at the University of Bayreuth (Germany). I have two contributions to international conferences (one oral and one poster), a published scientific paper to report remarkable results from my thesis and I am working on the upcoming papers. In 2019, I got a competitive national fellowship to join Electronic and Semiconductor (ElySe) group for 2 years as a postgraduated student. During this period, my major tasks were the characterisation and the simulation of solar cells (including impedance spectroscopy and I-V characterisation). I got my Master (M. Sc.) in Advanced Materials, Nanotechnology and Photonic at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, with a master thesis entitled “Impedance Spectroscopy on Optoelectronic Devices”. These results were published as a scientific paper and presented at a national conference (oral contribution). I got my Bachelor (B. Sc.) in Physics on 2018