Eliseo Ruiz - Biography#

Eliseo Ruiz is Full Professor and group leader at the Electronic Structure group at the University of Barcelona (UB). He achieved his degrees in Chemistry (1988) and Physics (1991) at the Universitat de Barcelona and performed his PhD in Chemistry at the Inorganic Chemistry Department of the same university in 1993, under the supervision of Prof. Santiago Alvarez, working in the theoretical description of weak Interactions in the solid state.

Along the years, he built in a systematic way a theoretical methodological approach of the magnetic properties of inorganic molecular systems, focusing on exchange interactions in dinuclear and then complex polynuclear systems. These endeavours benefitted to many experimentalists, worldwide, to understand the coupling between spin bearers. In a third step, Prof. Ruiz tackled the difficult problem of molecular anisotropy with transition metals and with lanthanide complexes with a similar success.

He is now an internationally recognized scientist in the field of theoretical methods applied to the magnetic properties of inorganic molecular systems, especially interested in the subjects of spin-crossover, exchange interactions and magnetic anisotropy in single-molecule magnets (most highly-cited papers in this research topic). More recently, he began contributions in Molecular Electronics and Spintronics focusing on room temperature magnetoresistance in single-molecule devices with magnetic molecules. He is feeding the experimental part of his programme by the synthesis and the characterization of supramolecular, bidimensional and mononuclear magnetic complexes. He shares his wide chemical and physical knowledge in many training sessions in Spain and abroad.

He led the installation and development of the computer facilities of Institute of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry of the University of Barcelona. Since 2018, he is the head of this Institute (María de Maeztu Excellence Award from the National Spanish Ministery in 2019).