Shantanu Mishra

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Atom and Molecule Manipulation laboratory since February 2021. My expertise lies in experimental surface science and scanning probe microscopy (viz. scanning tunneling microscopy and atomic force microscopy). My research interests center around on-surface chemistry for bottom-up fabrication of molecular nanostructures, low-dimensional magnetism, electronic transport in graphene nanostructures, molecular structure imaging, and charge transfer in single atoms and molecules.

I received my PhD in Physics from the University of Zurich, Switzerland in April 2020, for the experimental investigation of carbon-based magnetism in polyaromatic hydrocarbons and graphene nanoribbons by means of scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy. My doctoral research was carried out at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa). Between April 2020 to January 2021, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Empa, where I investigated the emergence of strongly-correlated phases in hydrocarbon spin chains and lattices.

I hold Master's degrees in Materials Chemistry from the University of Montpellier, France (2015) and in Applied and Engineering Physics from the Technical University of Munich, Germany (2014), and a Bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics from the National Institute of Technology Calicut, India (2013).

I have received several awards, notably the Max Auwärter Prize jointly awarded by the Max Auwärter Foundation (Liechtenstein) and the Austrian Physical Society (2024), the Gerhard Ertl Young Investigator Award of the German Physical Society (2024), an IBM Outstanding Research Accomplishment Award (2023), the Swiss Physical Society Prize in Condensed Matter Physics (2020), and the Empa Research Prize of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (2019).