© TU Wien

Associate Professor Dr Noelia Barrabés Rabanal, opens an external URL in a new window has been affiliated with the Institute of Materials Chemistry (E165) at the Faculty of Technical Chemistry as an Associate Professor of Metal Nanocluster Analysis since July 1, 2026.

CV: Noelia Barrabés comes originally from Barcelona in Spain and studied Chemical Engineering at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, where she was awarded a PhD summa cum laude in 2009 with a thesis titled “Selective Hydrogenation Catalysts for Environmental Processes: Removal of Nitrates and Chlorinated Compounds, opens an external URL in a new window”. She received awards for her doctoral thesis from both her home university and the Spanish Catalysis Society. During her doctoral studies, she undertook several research stays, notably at Queen’s University in Belfast. After completing her PhD, Noelia Barrabés moved to Montpellier to take up a postdoctoral position at the CNRS/ENSCM Centre, before joining the TU Wien in 2010 on an IEF Marie Curie Fellowship. From 2012, she spent several years at the University of Geneva, funded by a Marie Heim-Vögtlin Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2015, she returned to the TU Wien and has led the ClusCAT, opens an external URL in a new window research team at the Institute of Materials Chemistry since 2016. In 2019, she was awarded the Science Prize of the Society of Austrian Chemists (GÖCH). In 2023, she completed her habilitation at TU Wien, thereby qualifying to teach ‘Physical Chemistry’. Also in 2023, she received a highly endowed ERC ‘Consolidator Grant’. Furthermore, Noelia Barrabés demonstrated great commitment to the fuTUre fit process (2024–2025) at TU Wien: she was the head of one of the 10 working groups, namely the Research Working Group.

Noelia Barrabés Rabanal’s academic home is the Research Group for Model Catalysis and Applied Catalysis (E165-01-1) within the Research Unit of Physical Chemistry (E165-01) at the aforementioned institute. There, she heads the ClusCat research team. Her research focuses on the fields of nanomaterials and metal nanoclusters, surface sciences, spectroscopy and heterogeneous catalysis. Among other things, she is involved in the development of atomically precise metal nanoclusters for catalytic applications, as well as the investigation of their structure and behaviour using in situ and operando spectroscopy.

Publications by Noelia Barrabés Rabanal in the Scopus, opens an external URL in a new window database and in reposiTUm, opens an external URL in a new window.

[Website Noelia Barrabés Rabanal, opens an external URL in a new window]