Dr Maria Eugenia Sanz is a Reader in Physical Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry, King’s College London.

Maria obtained her PhD from University of Valladolid working on weakly-bound complexes under the supervision of Prof. Juan Carlos López and Prof. José Luis Alonso, and went on to join Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a postdoctoral fellow and visiting researcher to investigate molecules of astrophysical interest under the supervision of Prof. Patrick Thaddeus. She returned to Spain with a Ramon y Cajal Fellowship, and was later appointed Profesor Titular. From there she moved to King’s College London, where she started her own research group.

Research Interests

• Conformational and Structural Determination
• Non-covalent Interactions
• Microsolvation
• Molecular recognition
• Atmospheric processes

Teaching

• Physical Chemistry 1 and 3
• UG Research Methods Literature Review
• MSci Research Project & Dissertation
• MRes Research Project in Interdisciplinary Chemistry

Research profile

For more information on Dr Sanz's research please see her Research Portal page

The Sanz Group

Research Associates:

• Indira Murugachandran
• Charlotte Cummings

Postgraduate Researchers:

• Valerie Tsoi
• Satnam Dole

Structure, reactivity and function are intimately linked in chemical and biological systems. The Sanz group's research aims to obtain a better understanding of conformational preferences, the forces that determine them, and how/whether they change upon interactions with other molecules. Ultimately, this knowledge will allow us to have control over molecular structure.

We are particularly interested in:

• Microsolvation, where we examine solute-water interactions with an increasing number of water molecules, providing insight on the first steps of solvation at the molecular level.
• Molecular recognition, where we aim to determine the concerted effect of several non-covalent interactions that can result in selective binding between specific conformations.
• Atmospheric aerosol, and specifically the initial stages of atmospheric nucleation, where we investigate the structures and interactions of critical clusters that form in the gas phase.

We use broadband rotational spectroscopy, which provides structural information with an unprecedented level of detail, supported by quantum-chemistry calculations.