Ana Catarina Lopes is graduated in Physics and Chemistry since 2006 and got a Master’s Degree in Physics in 2009. In the same year she was awarded with PhD grant from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal). In September 2013, she completed a PhD in Science - Physics entitled “Development of electroactive polymer nanocomposites with porous structured materials”. All this formation has been performed at the Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal.

In july of 2015, she joined BCMaterials, Spain, as a Researcher and in 2016 she was awarded with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (Horizon 2020) under the project BIDMAG: “Biological detection with functionalized Magnetic Sensor”, also in BCMaterials. She was trained in magnetoelastic materials synthesis and characterization and introduced to biological methods.

She realized two secondments during her PhD, at the Biomaterial and Tissue Engineering Center, in the Universitad Politecnica de Valencia (Spain) and Physikalisches Institut and CeNTech, in the University of Münster (Germany).

Currently she maintain a close collaboration with the German company Vacuumschmelze GmbH, one of the world leading companies in the field of development, production and application know-how of soft, hard and semi-hard magnetic materials.

Her main interests are electroactive smart materials for applications in the area of sensors, actuators and energy. In CIC energiGUNE she will focus in the development and characterization of new materials for applications in the area of redox flow batteries.

• Electroactive smart materials
• Piezoelectric Polymer composites
• Magnetoelastic materials
• Applications in the area of sensor, actuators and energy

• Synthesis of inorganic materials and the production and characterization of polymer composites (thermal, mechanical, crystallografic, electrical, etc).
• Synthesis and characterization of Magnetoelastic (metallic glasses) ribbons
• Development of mass sensors (for gas and bacterial detection) based in magnetoelastic materials
• Development of actuators based on electroactive polymer composites.

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (2015). Horizon 2020- European Commission
• PhD studentship (2009) Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal).