Dr. Batlle is Full Professor since 2010 and Head of the Department of Condensed Matter Physics since 2019. He is co-leader of the Group of Magnetic Nanomaterials since 1993 (10 members at present and ca 65 in the past). He has been visiting researcher for 4 years in the Lawrence Berkeley Nat Lab (USA), U. California San Diego (USA), CNRS and Institute Laue Langevin (Grenoble) and U. Cambridge (UK), among others.
His work has aimed at the interplay among finite-size, surface, interface, interaction and proximity effects, and at the intimate correlation of the nanostructure to the magnetic, electronic and electron transport properties of nanomaterials, including thin films and heterostructures, nanoparticles, nanostructures and nanoelements. At present, he is working on potential applications of magnetic nanoparticles in biomedicine and has started a new research in arrays of plasmonic nanoelements.
Dr. Batlle holds 163 papers in SCI/Scopus with 5,700/6,000 citations (7,800 in Goggle Scholar) and h-index of 37/38 (h=42 in GS). He is the first author of one of the seminal papers in the field of magnetic nanostructures (J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 35, R15 (2002)), which holds about 1,600 citations. He has contributed to 480 scientific conferences, including more than 100 invited talks. He has supervised 8 Ph. D Theses, is currently supervising another one and has been the supervisor of ca. 40 students. He has devoted efforts to the transfer of knowledge to private companies since 1990s, in the use of magnetic nanoparticles in bio-applications and magnetic recording. He is co-inventor of one international patent for the use of exchange bias in multi-state logics and magnetic recording beyond binary logics that has been licensed since 2007 and has generated $174,000.
He is Fellow of the American Physical Society (2012); Member of the Board of Directors of the Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotecnology of UB since 2007 and area coordinator; Member of the Executive Committee of the Spanish Club of Magnetism (2014-2020); and Founder member of the Spanish Chapter of the Magnetics Society of the IEEE, for which he was President (2012-14). He was also member of the Executive Committee of the Division of Condensed Matter Physics of the Royal Spanish Physical Society (2010-2016) and of the Catalan Physical Society (2007-2011). He acted as Chair of the Local Committee and Member of the Executive Committee of the International Conference of Magnetism ICM-2015 (Barcelona; 2,197 scientists). ICM is the largest international meeting on magnetism in the world.
He has 36 years of teaching experience in 16 different subjects. Students have graded his teaching output with an average of 8.33/10 in 5 different subjects for 33 different surveys. Best outputs: Nanomagnetism and Spintronics 9.71 (2017-18); Solid State Phys. 9.25 (2018-19). He has got four times in a row 2017-20 the recognition of the Academic Committee of the Physics Faculty 'for excelling teaching in Solid State Physics, according to students' surveys output above 9/10', and an output above 9/10 for the Master Nanomagnetism and Spintronics (6, academic years, 2016-21).
Lately, he is involved in the organization of outreach activities for High School students, general public and scholar researchers. He is giving seminars on 'Woman and Science', 'You are right Mr. Feynman, there's plenty of room at the bottom, but as much as we expected?', 'Nanoscience, ethics and sustainability: a triad to solve' in a variety of science fairs, such as The February 11th Platform, The European Research Night and 10alamenos9 Festival. He gave the general public talk 'Dialogs around Nanoscience' at COSMOCAIXA Barcelona, broadcasted in Instagram Life. He is one of the organizers of the event 'NanoCaedre: A project for the hybridization of Science and Art', actor in the performance 'Dancing with Nanoparticles' (6 shows in 2021 and 2 in 2022), and member of the funded project 'Nanoinventum: Inventing the future's nanotechnology from primary school'.
