Shantanu Mishra

I am a postdoctoral researcher at IBM Research - Zurich since February 2021, where I am based in the Atom and Molecule Manipulation laboratory. My expertise lies in experimental surface science, with scanning probe microscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy as the main techniques. My research interests center around on-surface chemistry for bottom-up fabrication of carbon-based nanostructures, low-dimensional magnetism, electronic transport in graphene nanostructures, and atomic-scale charge transfer.

I received my PhD in physics from the University of Zurich, Switzerland in April 2020. My doctoral research was carried out at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA), where my advisors were Roman Fasel and Pascal Ruffieux. The focus of my doctoral research was on the investigation of pure carbon-based magnetism in polyaromatic hydrocarbons, organic polymers and graphene nanoribbons using scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy. 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 Physics from the Technical University of Munich, Germany (2014) and in Materials Science from the University of Montpellier, France (2015). For my Master's thesis, I worked at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland, where I studied the interplay of structural complexity and magnetism in non-stoichiometric praseodymium nickel oxide single crystals using neutron scattering. Earlier, I received my Bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics from the National Institute of Technology in Calicut, India (2013).

I have received several awards and fellowships, among them the Swiss Nanotechnology PhD Award from the Swiss Micro- and Nanotechnology Network (2020), Swiss Physical Society Award in Condensed Matter Physics (2020), Doctoral Distinction of the University of Zurich (2020), and the EMPA Research Award (2019).