Maria Jesus Aguilera-Roldan
PhD Student
Maria Jesus was born in a little village of Cordoba, Spain on December 25th in 1997. She moved to Malaga to perform her bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and there, she had her first contact with research synthesizing a peptide moiety in a cyclodepsipeptide with antiviral activity in the group of Prof. Francisco Sarabia.
Then, she performed an Erasmus Stay in Bruno University of Technology in Czech Republic for 6 months and after that, she carried out a master in organic chemistry in the University Autonomous of Madrid, Spain. She worked in the group of Prof. Mariola Tortosa, studying new catalytic processes for breaking C-N bonds in dihydropyridines.
Currently, she is a Ph.D. student of the ITN, Artificial Molecular Machines (ArtMoMa) in Strasbourg under the supervision of Prof. Jean-Marie Lehn and Prof. Nicolas Giuseppone. Her thesis is about a deep bottom-up study of a single molecule, diaminomaleonitrile (DAMN), to investigate unexplored types of motion in small molecules that could be exploited in the field of Molecular Machines. She also studied the motional dynamic of this molecule among other to design new artificial imine walking systems. During her thesis, she performed a secondment of two months in the University of Manchester under the supervision of Prof. David Leigh, where she worked in the optimization of autonomous fuelled rotary motors.