Gabriel Merino

Biography

I am a Professor in the Applied Physics Department at Centro de Investigacion y de Estudios Avanzados Merida (Cinvestav Mérida), México. I studied at Universidad de las Americas Puebla (B. S. in Chemistry, 1997) and Cinvestav Zacatenco (Ph. D. in Chemistry, 2003) under the supervision of Alberto Vela.

I then joined the group of Gotthard Seifert and Thomas Heine at TU Dresden as a postdoctoral fellow before returning to México in 2005 to take up my first independent research position at the Universidad de Guanajuato. In 2012, I decided to move to Cinvestav Mérida where my research group is one of the most active groups in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry in México and Latin America.

I spent a couple of long research stays at Cornell University (Roald Hoffmann, 2005), and the University of the Basque Country (Jesus Ugalde, 2011). I am a member of the Mexican National Researcher System (Level 3) and a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences.

I have been awarded the Research Grant from the Academia Mexicana de Ciencias (2012), the Catedra Marcos Moshinsky (2012), the National Prize “Andres Manuel del Rio” in Chemistry from the Mexican Chemical Society (2017), the Walter Kohn Award (2018) from the International Center of Theoretical Physics, and the Moshinsky Medal (2019) from Institute of Physics (UNAM). The main research interests of my group are the prediction of new chemical entities and the study of central concepts of chemistry, such as chemical bonding and aromaticity.

RSC affiliations

• Editorial board, Chemical Science