Biography

 Magalí Lingenfelder is currently leading the Max Planck-EPFL Laboratory for Molecular Nanoscience. Her vision is to create atomically tailored interfaces for applications in two distinct areas of urgent technological and societal relevance:  energy conversion and smart antimicrobial interfaces. To access the nanoscale, her group uses a combination of state-of-the-art scanning probe microscopy and solid state spectroscopy, allowing the study of kinetic processes in-situ under liquid flow and potential control conditions (operando electrocatalysis). She made seminal contributions to the field of metal-organic coordination networks on solid surfaces, and received the Otto Hahn medal in 2008 for the microscopic understanding of the chiral recognition process with submolecular resolution. She is a committed mentor, and since her relocation from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA to EPFL in 2013, she directed 3 MSc. theses, 4 PhD theses and 4 postdocs. She advocates for  problem-oriented interdisciplinary research: she led 5 international research consortiums, delivered over 40 invited presentations and organized 9 conferences and 4 doctoral schools.  In 2018, the Royal Society of Chemistry included her work in the first collection “Celebrating Excellence in Research: 100 Women of Chemistry”. 

Current work

We work at the interface between Physics, Biology, Chemistry and Material Sciences, exploring new concepts and mechanisms at the nanoscale. Our current work is focused on tracking fundamental molecular recognition and energy conversion processes in nanostructured materials, across length and timescales and under relevant operando conditions.
Moreover, we use surface science tools to explore the coding of biomimetic structures at the nanoscale. Our goal is to unravel and edit nature’s protocols to design hierarchical materials from molecular building blocks that can self-assemble with predictable shapes and functions: BioNanoarchitectonics.