Isabel Povedano

I am a Ph.D. graduate by the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with Diamond Light Source. I have a multidisciplinary research background in areas such as condensed matter chemistry/physics and the design of high-pressure scientific instrumentation.  

My bachelor’s is in chemistry at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), followed by a master's degree in Nanotechnology and Molecular Nanoscience. During this period, I conducted high-pressure spectroscopic studies on carbon-based materials with interest in food science and in the development of advanced electronic devices.  

After that, I moved to the UK and pursued a Ph.D. centred on the design of low-temperature/high-pressure instrumentation to study electron-correlated materials using Resonant Elastic X-ray Scattering (REXS). The core of my research was the design of the instrumentation required in I16 to perform high-pressure REXS experiments, together with the study of the electronic states in 5d transition metal oxides (TMOs) under extreme conditions. In particular, I designed an experimental setup and used it to explore the interplay between the energy scales ruling the electronic behaviour of 5d TMOs, where the strong spin-orbit coupling directly competes with other interactions such as the crystal field and the Coulomb repulsion (U), giving rise to exotic magnetic ground states.