LEIRE
RUIZ RUBIO

Leire Ruiz Rubio is Associate Professor in the Department of Physical Chemistry at University of the Basque Country since 2020, Assistant Professor from 2015 to 2020 and lecturer from 2012 to 2015. She is part of the Macromolecular Chemist Group of the Dept. Physical Chemistry, and she obtained her PhD in 2012 under the supervision of Dr. María Teresa Garay. In her early career, her research has focused on the synthesis and characterization of polymeric materials, the study of the hydrogen bond interactions between polymers both in solution and on surfaces and the development of nanostrutured surfaces. She made two short stays at Laboratoire de Chimie des Polymères Organiques at Bordeaux I University (France) and at Instituto de Ciencia y Tecnología de los Polímeros (ICTP-CSIC), Spain), in which she has the opportunity of working with Dr. Juan Rodriguez Hernandez and achieve an important knowledge about surface modification being the precursor of one of the research line of the her group and two publications. Also, she made a 3 month stay as Invited Researcher at Reading University (UK) focused in the development of new drug delivery hydrogels and the characterization of their mucoadhesive properties under the supervision of Professor Vitaliy Khutoryanskiy. The most relevant results of her research are reflected in over 70 (WOS, more than 70% Q1) articles (91 in total) with over to 1400 citations and h-index of 23. She is author of 13 book chapters and 1 book. Now, she has focused her research in surface modification techniques, the develop novel optical biosensors, antibacterial hydrogels, self-healable hydrogels based on organic-inorganic interactions, nano/microstuctured polymer thin films, 3D and 4D printing and soil and water remediation technologies based in polymers and nanoparticles. She has participate in over 36 research projects with a total budget over 2.7M € (3 as IP including HORIZON EUROPE, SYMBIOREM, over 600K €) and private research contracts (1 as IP) with a total budget of over 260K €. In addition, she is a evaluator of projects for Agencia Nacional de Promoción de la Investigación, el Desarrollo Tecnológico y la Innovación de la República Argentina and Poland National Science Centre and for Private consulting agencies evaluating enterprise’s research. Beyond her research experience, she has been as full lecturer (10 years), now she is Associate Professor in advanced undergraduate courses on Physical Chemistry and Polymer Science and graduate students on New Polymeric Materials. She have supervised undergraduate students in their Master (11 student), Bachelor Thesis (more than 20 student) focused on polymer science and 1 PhD student and supervising 2 PhD students.