Biography

Miquel Solà obtained his PhD at the UAB in 1991 with academic honours. His doctoral research under the supervision of Profs. Juan Bertran and Agustí Lledós was awarded with the Saint Albert Prize. After several months in a consultant private company (Better consultants), in 1993 he moved to the University of Girona (UdG) as assistant researcher. In 1994 he did postdoctoral research in Amsterdam with Prof. Evert Jan Baerends and in 1995 in Calgary with Prof. Tom Ziegler. He was appointed assistant professor of the UdG in 1997. In 2001, he got the Distinction for the Promotion of University Research (young scientist category). Since 2003, he holds a permanent position as full professor in the UdG. He was awarded with the ICREA Academia Prize two times, in 2009 and 2014. In 2013 he got the Physical Chemistry prize awarded by the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2019, he received the recognition of Honorary member of the Polish Chemical Society “in appreciation of his brilliant achievements and outstanding support for Polish chemistry and Polish Chemical Society”. And in 2023, he became fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He works in the field of theoretical and computational chemistry. In the last years, his research interests have been mainly focused on four research lines: i) the study of molecular aromaticity, and particularly the development of new indicators of aromaticity and the examination of new forms of aromaticity such as three-dimensional aromaticity, excited state aromaticity, metalloaromaticity, and multiple aromaticity; ii) the analysis of the nature of the chemical bond using energy decomposition analysis and different electron delocalization measures like multicenter electron delocalization indices or the electron localization function; and iii) the investigation of organic and organometallic reaction mechanisms with special emphasis on the [2+2+2] catalysed reactions and the reactivity of fullerenes and endohedral metallofullerenes. He is coauthor of more than 475 scientific papers (h = 72), 42 book chapters and 1 book. He has supervised 23 doctoral Theses. He serves in the Advisory Editorial Board of Chem. Sci., Theor. Chem. Acc. and in the Editorial Board of Front. Chem., ACS Omega, and Anales de Química journals. At the UdG, he has served as director of the Institute of Computational Chemistry and Catalysis (2004-07, 2023-), director of the Department of Chemistry (2007-10), and director of the School of Doctoral Studies (2010-14 and 2018-2022). From 2015 to 2018, he was associate coordinator of Chemistry in the Research Spanish Agency (AEI) and, from 2014 to 2019, he was coordinator of Sciences field in the Catalan Agency of Evaluation (AGAUR).