Dr. Laura González Vivas
Marie Curie Postdoctoral (Researcher)
Already during my undergraduate studies at University of Valle in Cali, Colombia, my interest in nanoscience and nanotechnology prompted me to apply for an international exchange program to study my last undergraduate year at the University of Campinas in Brazil (2007), where I worked under the guidance of Prof. Marcelo Knobel in the synthesis and characterization of magnetic nanoparticles.
Thereafter, I conducted my PhD work under the supervision of Prof. Manuel Vazquez at the Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales (ICMM-CSIC) in Madrid (2008-2012) on the fabrication and magnetic characterization (synthesis, structural, magnetometry, temperature measurements, in situ transport measurements, clean room processes) of magnetic nanostructures. Additionally, I performed micromagnetic computer simulations to further understand the experimental observations, mentored by Dr. Oksana Chubykalo-Fesenko also at the ICMM.
In 2013, I joined the Physics Department of Los Andes University (Colombia) to work as a lecturer of General Physics and postdoctoral researcher to study magneto transport and magneto-optic properties of ferromagnetic/superconducting thin films heterostructures. I continued to hone my experimental skills as postdoc researcher at the University of Zaragoza, Spain (2014) under the supervision of Prof. L. M. Garcia-Vinuesa, where I focused my research on the structural, electronic and magnetic properties of granular Co-Pd alloy thin film multilayers systematically studied by means of high-resolution transmission-electron microscopy, SQUID-based magnetometry, X-ray diffraction, X-ray absorption spectroscopy: XANES, EXAFS and XMCD.
Notably, in May 2015 I moved to the Physics Department of the University of Luxembourg. I was funded by an AFR Marie-Curie COFUND fellowship. I was hosted by the group of Prof. Andreas Michels. We set up a rather ambitious goal, namely, to develop a hybrid theoretical and computational model to interpret experimental data using small-angle neutron scattering in magnetic nanoparticles. The challenges were two-fold, first any theory development was hampered by our predominant experimental background, and second the intrinsic difficulty to understand the rich complexity of spin configurations emerging when working at the crossover between characteristic length scales in magnetism. Despite those difficulties, I led a couple of purely theoretical works which have been published in the journals Scientific Reports and Physical Review Letters, underlining my level of independence, maturity and capacity to successfully tackle new research projects.
Currently, since February 2023, I work in the FINDER group under the guidance of Prof. M. Martin-Gonzalez in a new, exciting and challenging research project focused on the investigation of novel magnetic phenomena in 3D magnetic nanowire networks, which is funded by the EU Commission through a Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship.
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=S9u7ALIAAAAJ&hl=en