Dr Esther Punzón Quijorna
Esther Punzón Quijorna is PhD in Physics from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Spain. She was awarded a scholarship by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation for a PhD in the program of "Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology", at Applied Physics Department and Center for Micro Analysis of Materials (CMAM), both at UAM. She finished her PhD in 2015 working in the development of biofunctional patterns, by ion implantation, on Porous Silicon (PSi) and Titanium Nitride (TiN), as platforms to study the response of human mesenchymal cells. Throughout her PhD, she gained expertise on ion beam techniques for modification (ion implantation) and characterization (EBS, Channeling, etc.). During her period as PhD student, she was trainee at the Nanobiosciences Unit from Institute for Health and Consumer Protection, Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, in Ispra (Italy).
In 2018, she was awarded a Marie Curie post-doctoral individual fellowship to study the effects of prosthesis failures into the human tissue, by exploring the distribution and quantification of metallic debris by Particle Induced X-ray Emission (PIXE) at Department of Low and Medium Energy Physics F2 (MIC) at the Jožef Stefan Institute.