Foto: Frank Hauke, FAU

Recent discoveries in Materials science have revealed a continuous trend in making collaborative, multidisciplinary research teams to solve fundamental questions in Nanotechnology, which derived into Physics and Chemistry. For instance, graphene’s large-scale production has been one of these fundamental questions in Materials science since the discovery of graphene in 2004. The main existing graphene production techniques are: a) Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD), b) Mechanical Exfoliation, and c) Chemical Exfoliation. All these three techniques have implications in the physical properties of graphene, which strongly depend on the chemistry behind the production method chosen. In this talk, I will show how international scientific collaborations with diverse areas of expertise can accomplish crucial breakthroughs in the understanding of the fundamental properties of nanomaterials. I am going to demonstrate, how the correct interpretation of these properties helps in solving scalability issues for industrial production of nanomaterials like graphene. Finally, I will briefly present how in-situ Raman spectroscopy can be used as a highly effective technique to control the functionalization of nanomaterials in a fast, contact-free and extensive way.

Julio Chacon obtained his B.Sc. in Mechatronics Engineering at Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico in 2008. He enrolled the graduated program of Applied Sciences at the Institute of Science and Technology of San Luis Potosi in Mexico and further moved to Vienna in 2010 where he conducted his PhD within a French-Austrian Cooperation program cofounded by the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) and the OEAD Amadeus Program. He graduated with honors and obtained his “Dr. rer. nat.” degree in November 2013 with a thesis entitled: “Theory and Spectroscopy on functionalized graphene and GICs”. In May 2014, he was awarded an individual Marie Curie DRS Postdoctoral Fellowship at Freie Universität Berlin in Germany. Since September 2016, Julio moved to Ecuador and started working at Yachay Tech as Assistant Professor where he published his last article in “Nature Communications” based in the chemical functionalization of graphene. His research interests lie in the development of new nanomaterials, nanoelectronic device technologies, and the disentangling of supramolecular interactions in nanostructured materials by using optical characterization techniques such as Raman spectroscopy