Biography

Manuel Melle-Franco got a Chemistry Degree at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), a Materials Chemistry M.Sc., and a Physics PhD from the University of Kent (UK). He was a junior researcher with Francesco Zerbetto at the University of Bologna (Italy) before he moved to Portugal to become an independent researcher. Manuel holds a principal researcher position at the University of Aveiro (Portugal) where he leads the Advanced Modelling Lab. His group specializes in carbon nanomaterials, covalent organic frameworks, and more generally, organic and inorganic materials and biomolecules for technological uses. Manuel’s group has a sizeable output in high-visibility journals like Nature, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Chemistry, Chem, Nature Communications, JACS and Angewandte Chemie. Manuel’s work is often highlighted on national radio and newspapers and in several specialized media outlets, such as Nature Reviews Chemistry, Chemistry World, Physics World, SynFacts, Chemistry Views, and Computational Chemistry Highlights. To date, Manuel has coordinated 26 between researchers, postdocs and students. He has been awarded more than 1.5M euros of direct funding in areas ranging from bioelectronics and nanotechnology to quantum materials, within the FET-OPEN, Pathfinder and M.ERA.NET EU programs as well as several national projects. In addition, to several projects and grants in national and international high-performance computing centres, he is one of the proponents and MC member of the NanoSpace European COST action (CA21126). He does peer reviews for over 40 different journals (including Nature and Science) and evaluates projects for m-era.net and COST European networks, the Europe H2020 program, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Polish Physical Sciences and Engineering Research Council.