Antonella Badia is a Professor at the Université de Montréal, where she leads a research program centered on structure–property relationships in organic ultrathin films formed by molecular self-assembly or Langmuir–Blodgett deposition, and on the use of such organized films in applications including redox-responsive surfaces, nanomechanical actuation and sensing, and biomembrane models. Ever since she first heard, as an undergraduate student, about a microscope capable of seeing atoms, she has been determined to use scanning probe microscopy (SPM) in her research. Many years later, she remains excited by the experience of watching the secrets of a material surface emerge point by point and line by line through SPM imaging. Her current work primarily uses Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) to investigate how inhaled molecular and particulate species alter the structure of pulmonary surfactant films and to assess their potential to impair respiratory health. Other work focuses on electrochemical AFM studies of redox-modified electrode surfaces to understand how molecular charge conversion translates into collective interfacial behavior and, ultimately, into device or material performance.
Antonella Badia is also the scientific director of Université de Montréal’s core facility in Scanning Probe Microscopy, which is used by hundreds of researchers each year.
Recent AFM-related papers:
Biography: Antonella received her PhD in Chemistry from McGill University in Montreal in 1996. She then held Schlossmann and NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, where she employed surface plasmon resonance and electrochemical AFM to investigate the chemisorption and reductive desorption of organothiolate self-assembled monolayers on metal surfaces. She subsequently completed a second postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Physics at McGill University, working on block copolymer film lithography, before joining the Department of Chemistry at Université de Montréal in 1999. Antonella is a researcher at the Institut Courtois, which is dedicated to fundamental research in materials accelerated by artificial intelligence, and a Cottrell Scholar (Research Corporation for Science Advancement).
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Antonella-Badia
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