Dr Paz Vaqueiro

Dr Vaqueiro's research interests lie in the field of Solid-State Chemistry. Current research areas include the discovery of new materials for energy recovery and conversion, in particular thermoelectric and photovoltaic materials, as well as work on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) for drug delivery.

Major themes of her research activity in thermoelectric materials, which enable conversion of heat into useful electrical power, include copper-containing minerals, the investigation of the interplay between structure and properties, and materials with ultralow thermal conductivity. Her research in thermoelectric materials was initiated during a five-year EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship and has subsequently received financial support from a variety of funding bodies: The Leverhulme Trust, Innovate UK, EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), ISIS (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory), the European Union (FP7 program) and the Royal Society. This includes large collaborative projects, such as the GCRF-EPSRC project “From the Indian Copper Belts to Chulhas: Affordable Thermoelectric Materials for Rural India”, which involved researchers from the University of Manchester and the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (India).

Dr Vaqueiro is currently seeking to discover alternative photovoltaic materials, which enable the conversion of solar energy into electrical power, by focusing on the design of new halides containing post-transition elements with an ns2 electronic configuration. By exploiting solvothermal and mechanochemical synthetic approaches, she is exploring the synthesis of new hybrid bismuth halides, as alternative materials that may offer the high conversion efficiency of the hybrid lead perovskites, together with long-term stability and low toxicity.

In collaboration with Prof Kenneth Shankland (Pharmacy), Dr Vaqueiro is investigating the potential of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) as an alternative for controlled drug delivery. Highlights of this work, which requires scaling up the synthesis of these materials, include a study of the reaction mechanism of the mechanochemical synthesis of MOF-74, carried out at Diamond, on the beamline I11.

Dr Vaqueiro is an Associate Editor for the journal ACS Applied Electronic Materials, published by the American Chemical Society, and a member of the Editorial Board of JPhys Energy (Institute of Physics).