Sophie Carenco

Sophie Carenco graduated in 2008 from Ecole Polytechnique opens in new tab/window, Palaiseau (France). She obtained her PhD in 2011 from University Pierre & Marie Curie, Paris, for her work on the synthesis and applications of metal phosphide nanoparticles.

From 2012 to 2013, she was a post-doctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, where she used synchrotron-based in situ spectroscopies (near-ambient-pressure XPS, high pressure XAS) to monitor the surface state of (bi)metallic nanoparticles during catalytic reactions.

In 2014, she joined CNRS as a researcher in Laboratoire de Chimie de la Matière Condensée de Paris (LCMCP) at Sorbonne Université. She works on novel synthetic routes of exotic nanomaterials for energy-relevant challenges such as CO₂ valorization. In 2017, she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant to work on small molecules activation at the surface of nanoparticles.

She was awarded the European Young Chemist Award from EuCheMS (2010) and the C'Nano National Award (2012) for her PhD work. More recently, she was awarded the Bronze Medal of CNRS, the Jean Rist Medal of SF2M, the Young Chemist Award of SCF-DCP and the Clara Immerwahr Award from Uniyscat. She is also involved in science outreach and published in 2012 a book about nanomaterials and chemistry.