Plenary Speaker

Clivia M. Sotomayor Torres started her undergraduate studies in the Physics Department, Science Faculty, of the U. de Chile, and completed them at Southampton University (U.K.).

She obtained her PhD in Physics in 1984 from the University of Manchester, UK, with a thesis on semiconductor physics.

She held tenured academic appointments in the UK as a physics lecturer at St Andrews university and  as lecturer and senior lecturer in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Glasgow university.

Clivia received awards from ZONTA International (USA, Amelia Earhart Fellowship), the Nuffield Foundation and the Royal Society of Edinburgh

She held the Chair of Material Sciences in Electronics at Wuppertal University in Germany for eight years before becoming research professor at the National University of Ireland University College Cork (Tyndall National Institute). In 2008 she became an  ICREA research professor leading research in phononic and photonic nanostructures at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience in Barcelona, Spain.

She carries out research in the science and engineering of phononic systems, nanophotonics and nanoscale thermal transport. In 2020 she was elected to the Academia Europaea. She is holder of an European Research Council advanced grant investigating phonon transport in topological waveguides. For her work in nanofabrication she received the 50-Years Nanoimprinting Pioneer award. For her work in phononics, she received the Bloch medal in July 2025. For her contributions to the physics of phonon scattering in semiconductor nanostructures she received the Klemens award in December 2025.

Since September 2023 she is the Director General of the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) in Braga, Portugal, where she has set up a new research group researching phonons physics.