Carmen Martínez Alonso, a doctoral student at the Faculty of Chemical Sciences of the UCM, is one of the seven Spanish students who will enjoy the prestigious Fulbright scholarships, financed by the governments of the United States and Spain, next year.  The student from Complutense will enjoy a six-month research stay at the SunCat Center of Standford University, in California, United States, a world leader in hydrogen economy, which will allow her to advance her doctoral thesis, dedicated to finding cheaper catalysts than platinum to produce this green energy.

Carmen Martínez Alonso is a graduate in Chemistry from the University of Burgos. In Madrid, he has completed a master’s degree at the Institute of Polymer Science and Technology of the CSIC and is currently in the Faculty of Chemical Sciences of the UCM doing his Doctorate, although his work is being carried out at the IMDEA Institute of Materials, in Getafe. There, as she herself explains, she is dedicated to designing catalysts to produce energy based on hydrogen, one of the most promising green energies. “In the hydrogen economy –she points out- there are two main processes: the production of hydrogen and the use of this hydrogen to produce energy with very little waste.Today the catalysts used to produce that energy are made from platinum, and platinum is among the ten most expensive materials in the world . My thesis is to try to find a material that is as efficient as platinum, but cheaper. I am working with alloys of platinum and other transition metals. I am theoretical chemistry. I do modeling, that is, everything is computer simulations”.The doctoral student from Complutense presented her candidacy to the Fulbright Commission requesting to go to the Suncat center of Stanford University, a world leader in the hydrogen economy. “The project consists of using all the data that I have calculated to, through artificial intelligence, predict which materials may be the best to function as catalysts, since there are immense possibilities. We are going to use artificial intelligence tools to discriminate which may be the best. I go there for six months, from September 15 to March 15, to teach me their machine learning techniques”, concludes Carmen, who in addition to developing her scientific career, studies classical philology at the UNED – “I love writing poetry”-. forkschoreographer, dancer and plays the piano.