David Fairen-Jimenez

I am leading the Adsorption & Advanced Materials Lab at the University of Cambridge.

Our research concerns the study of the molecular mechanisms that control adsorption processes in porous materials. We are particularly interested in drug delivery systems, where nanotechnology has a fundamental impact to revolutionise cancer diagnosis and therapy. We are also interested in the use of novel porous materials for the necessary shift from today’s fossil-based energy economy to a more sustainable economy based on hydrogen and renewable energy, linked to carbon capture to mitigate the effects of global warming. Our objective is to evaluate new strategies in the study of adsorption processes, the study and design of new porous materials such as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and to develop new methods in the prediction of their performance.

In our work, we combine molecular simulation techniques such as grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to study adsorption and diffusion phenomena with experimental techniques that include gas adsorption, confocal microscopy, cell cultures, calorimetry, neutron and X-Ray diffraction and small-angle X-Ray scattering.