The Team
Our theory team is formed by:
Anurag Verma, a PhD student since September 2025. Anurag works on antiferroelectric materials for energy storage.
Nils A. Schäfer, a PhD student since September 2025. Nils works on pyroelectric energy harvesting.
Manjunath Betha, a PhD student since September 2025. Manjunath works on electric quasiparticles for unconventional computing.
David Carvalho, a PhD student since September 2025. David works on catalysis on ferroelectric surfaces.
Cameron Scott, a postdoc since September 2025. Cameron explores novel strategies to induce topologies and functional properties in ferroelectrics.
Xabier Díaz de Cerio, a postdoc since April 2025. Xabier studies the electromechanical properties of hafnia nanostructures.
Urmimala Dey, a postdoc since October 2024 working with Hugo Aramberri. Urmimala investigates the dynamical response properties of electric bubbles and other complex ferroelectric textures.
Nicolaie Cernov, a PhD student since October 2024. Nicolaie works on mesoscopic simulations of ferroelectrics in the presence of free charges.
Iñigo Robredo, a postdoc since September 2024. Iñigo investigates the mechanisms controlling ferroelectric switching in nanostructures.
Krishna Patel, a PhD student since June 2024. Krishna studies electric quasiparticles for unconventional computing.
Mauro Pulzone, a PhD student since September 2022. Mauro develops effective machine-learning approaches to simulate dynamical properties of ferroelectrics.
Natalya S. Fedorova, a permanent researcher at LIST since April 2025.
Hugo Aramberri, a permanent researcher at LIST since January 2022.
Jorge Íñiguez-González, who started this pursuit in 2005 at the ICMAB-CSIC (Spain) and moved to LIST in January 2015.
Former mentees
I am sometimes asked about the careers of former PhD students and postdocs. Here is a rather complete list of people I have supervised over the years, in reverse chronological order, providing a description of their later activities with varying degrees of concreteness.
Binayak Mukherjee left our group to work as a postdoc at the University of Liège (Belgium).
Natalya S. Fedorova never left our group... because she was promoted to a position as permanent scientist at LIST (Luxembourg).
Diana Elisa Murillo Navarro got her PhD from the University of Luxembourg in October 2023. She is currently taking some time to ponder her career opportunities.
John Mangeri left our group to work as a postdoc at the Technical University of Denmark.
Sangita Dutta got her PhD from the University of Luxembourg in June 2022. She left our group to work as a postdoc at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden).
Mónica Graf left our group to work as a postdoc at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
Hugo Aramberri never left our group... because he was promoted to a position as permanent scientist at LIST (Luxembourg).
Alireza Sasani got his PhD from the Universtiy of Liège (Belgium) in December 2021. (Thesis co-supervised with Eric Bousquet.) After his PhD he stayed in Liège to work as a postdoc.
Mauro A.P. Gonçalves got his PhD from the University of Luxembourg and the Universidad de Cantabria (Spain) in July 2020. (Thesis co-supervised with Javier Junquera.) He left our group to work as a postdoc at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, where he eventually became a staff scientist.
Juan Antonio Seijas-Bellido got his PhD from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) in October 2019. (Thesis co-supervised with Riccardo Rurali.) He left our group to work as a postdoc at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain). He later realized teaching was his calling and got a permanent position in a high school in Seville.
Javier Alanis got his PhD from the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (Mexico) in June 2019. (Thesis co-supervised with María Eugenia Mendoza.) After his PhD he went for a postdoc at the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí (Mexico).
Carlos Escorihuela-Sayalero got his PhD from the University of Luxembourg in April 2019. He left our group to work as a postdoc at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain). He later joined IDEADED -- a new semiconductors company near Barcelona -- to run R&D projects as a computational physicist.
Peng Chen left our group to work as a postdoc at the Italian Institute of Technology (Italy). He eventually became a professor at the Guangdong Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology, in Shantou (China).
Hong Jian Zhao left our group to work as a postdoc at the University of Arkansas (USA). He later became a professor at Jilin University (China).
Jacek C. Wojdeł left our group to work as a "Profesional Cloud Wrestler" in various technological start-ups in the Barcelona area (Spain). Jacek came up with the term "second principles"... and with the first code implementing them! (SPLD = "Second-Principles Lattice Dynamics")
Mathias P. Ljungberg left our group to work as a postdoc at the Donostia International Physics Center (Spain). He later became a consultant and software developer at Savantic AB (Sweden).
Otto Emiliano González-Vázquez got his PhD from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) in July 2012. He left our group to work as a postdoc at the International Center for Theoretical Physics (Trieste, Italy). He later became a computer scientist at the Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste.
Zeila Zanolli left our group to work as a postdoc at the University of Liège (Belgium). She later became a professor at Utrecht University (The Netherlands).
Roberta Poloni left our group to work as a postdoc at the Molecular Foundry (Berkeley Lab, USA). She later became a CNRS scientist at SIMaP Grenoble (France).
Manuel Cobian left our group to work as a postdoc at the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (France). He later became a professor at École Centrale Lyon.
Collaborators
I have been fortunate to work with many superb scientists over the years. A non-exhaustive, seldom-updated, yet-representative list of collaborators includes:
Laurent Bellaiche (University of Arkansas)
Eric Bousquet (Université de Liège)
Nicholas Bristowe (Durham University)
Enric Canadell (Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona, ICMAB-CSIC)
Andrés Cano (Institut Néel)
Claudio Cazorla (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)
Oswaldo Diéguez (Tel Aviv University)
Brahim Dkhil (CentraleSupélec)
Alessio Filippetti (Università degli Studi di Cagliari)
Vincenzo Fiorentini (Università degli Studi di Cagliari)
Pablo García-Fernández (Universidad de Cantabria)
Philippe Ghosez (Université de Liège)
Marta Gibert (TU Wien)
Alexei Gruverman (University of Nebraska)
Javier Junquera (Universidad de Cantabria)
Igor Luk'yanchuk (Université de Picardy)
Maria Eugenia Mendoza (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla)
Dennis Meier (Universität Duisburg-Essen)
Joaquim Agostinho Moreira (Universidade do Porto)
Guillaume F. Nataf (GREMAN, CNRS / Université de Tours)
Dmitri E. Nikonov (Kepler Computing)
Beatriz Noheda (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
Charles Paillard (University of Arkansas)
Ramamoorthy Ramesh (UC Berkeley)
Riccardo Rurali (Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona, ICMAB-CSIC)
Jacobo Santamaría (Universidad Complutense)
Massimiliano Stengel (ICREA / ICMAB-CSIC)
Jean-Marc Triscone (Université de Gèneve)
Hongjun Xiang (Fudan University)
Yurong Yang (Nanjing University)
Pavlo Zubko (University College London)