Xavier Just-Baringo

Xavi was born and raised in Barcelona. He obtained his PhD from the University of Barcelona (2013) after working on the total synthesis of marine antimicrobial natural products under the supervision of Prof. Mercedes Álvarez and Prof. Fernando Albericio at IRB Barcelona. Thanks to the results obtained, Xavi was one of the Reaxys PhD Prize finalists in 2014. He then moved to the University of Manchester, where he joined the group of Prof. David Procter (2013) to work on the development of new SmI2-H2O promoted radical cyclisations and cascade reactions. He then joined Prof. Igor Larrosa's group (2017), where he worked on new C-H functionalisations of pyrene derivatives and studied their applications in the aqueous exfoliation of graphene and its potential uses in biomedicine.

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In 2019, Xavi returned to IRB Barcelona as a Beatriu de Pinós Fellow in Prof. Ernest Giralt's lab, where he started working on the synthesis of visible light active photoswitches and antibiotics. In 2021 he was appointed Lecturer at the University of Barcelona, where he has started his independent career.

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In 2020, Xavi was awarded the Young Investigator Award in Natural Products by GeProNat, the specialised group in natural products from the RSEQ (Spanish Royal Chemistry Society).