Ulises Julio Amador Elizondo

Professor Amador started his research career in Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) in 1987 working on high Tc superconductors (HTSC) as Ph. D Project. He defended his thesis in 1992 supervised by Prof. Morán.
The two final years of the PhD period (1991-1992) he worked as a Project Leader in the R&D laboratory of Tudor S.A. (now Exide Spain); in 1993 he worked in the R&D laboratory of Hagen Batteries (Germany) leading a project on especial lead alloys for stationary lead-acid batteries.
In 1993 Prof. Amador moved to the single-crystal X-ray diffraction and crystallography laboratory of the UCM, under the guidance of Profs. Gutierrez-Puebla and Monge (now at ICMM), to be in charge of the diffractometers and giving service of structure determination.
In September 1996 he got a position in to Universidad CEU San Pablo (USP-CEU) as Assistant Professor into the group of Prof. García-Alvarado in the Inorganic Chemistry Materials Department of Faculty of Pharmacy, gaining long experience on lecturing, researching and managing.
In 2017 he promotes to Full Professor of Inorganic Chemistry after recognition of his merits by ANECA in 2013.
The first years at USP-CEU his research was focused on inorganic materials for lithium batteries. One of the main contributions was the systematic study of polyoxoanionic compounds as cathodes for lithium batteries combining theoretical (DFT) and experimental approaches. Besides, a new area in the field was started applying high pressure to the synthesis of cathode materials.
In 2003 Prof. Amador moved to the field of SOFC materials as a result of a strategic decision of broadening the scope of the group´s research. In 2004, a laboratory to measure electrical and electrochemical properties was set and he started the investigations on new prospective materials for SOFC cathodes. Thus since 2006 he has largely contributed to this topic reporting many competitive material with double perovskite structure.
Presently, besides the development of new SOFC materials, he is interested in the preparation of composite electrodes (electrocatalyst+electrolyte) by non-conventional methods and the processing of these composites to preserve the improved properties (particle size, large specific area, etc). Another topic of interest is the decoration of electrodes by metal nanoparticles applying simple, clean, rapid and scalable methods.
His research activity has produced 159 scientific papers (135 Q1), which received 2903 cites (till 10/02/21) resulting in an h index of 28. Since 1987 the research activity developed by Porf. Amador was founded uninterruptedly by many institutions at local, national and international level.
From 2003 to day, Prof. Amador is the head of the X-ray and Scanning Electron Microscopy Laboratory of USP-CEU.
He is a regular user of large European facilities such as ILL (neutron diffraction) and ESRF (synchrotron diffraction and X-ray spectroscopies).
Noteworthy, Professor Amador has been member of the evaluation panel of the MINECO in the Materials and Biomaterials area of Plan Nacional, from 2007 to 2017; currently (from 2017) he is part of the evaluation board of College 5A (Crystallography) of ILL (Grenoble).