Dr. Alfonso Garcia-Bennett

Alf completed his PhD thesis in 2003 at St. Andrews University (Scotland) on the Synthesis and Characterization of Mesoporous materials and their application in catalysis under the supervision of Professor Paul Wright. He continued his career at the University of Tohoku (Sendai, Japan) where he focused on the structural characterisation of porous materials by electron microscopy and electron crystallography. He followed his post-doctoral supervisor Professor Osamu Terasaki from Japan to Sweden, where he continued his research at Stockholm University. In 2005 Alf became Assistant Professor at the Department of Nanotechnology and Functional Materials of Uppsala University (Sweden).

Alf is active in the research field of mesoporous materials and their application, having written numerous articles on this topic, several patents as well as supervised four PhD thesis. He is also the co-founder of Nanologica AB (Stockholm 2004), a company which commercialises mesoporous materials in the pharmaceutical sector as drug delivery vehicles and as separation media. Since February 2015 he is a senior research fellow at the ARC Centre for Nanoscale BioPhotonics (CNBP) and a member of the Department of Molecular Sciences of Macquarie University. In December 2015 he was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship in order to study how the intrinsic physico-chemical properties of nanoparticles translate into biological properties through their interaction with physiological proteins in the body.

He has experience with the characterization of nanostructured materials with a variety of advanced techniques including transmission and scanning electron microscopy, gas adsorption and x-ray diffraction. His work thus also includes the development of these techniques.

In 2021 Alf became the Research Director of the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Facilitated Advancement of Australia’s Bioactives (FAAB). FAAB is a consortium of 4 Universities and 13 Partner Organisations led by Professor Alison Rodger, Associate Professor Alf Garcia-Bennett, and Professor Anwar Sunna at Macquarie University. The Centre is composed of a multidisciplinary team from the Australian bioactives industry with academic partners from Macquarie University, Deakin University, the University of South Australia, and Western Sydney University. In total FAAB will recruit 18 students into two cohorts of students to start in 2022 and 2023.