Dr. Casadevall was born in Palafrugell, Girona (Spain), in 1991 and is currently a Ramón y Cajal Fellow (the Spanish equivalent of a tenure-track Assistant Professor) and a Junior Group Leader at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) and the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ) in Tarragona (Spain). Her group focuses on the development of catalyst-functionalized polymeric microreactors for the production of solar fuels and chemicals within the fields of artificial photosynthesis and photoredox catalysis.

 

She obtained a BSc in Chemistry (2013) and an MSc in Advanced Catalysis and Molecular Modelling (2014) from the University of Girona (Spain). She then moved to ICIQ to pursue her PhD (2015–2019), working on homogeneous systems for artificial photosynthesis and photoredox catalysis. During her PhD, she completed four international research stays at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), Arizona State University (USA), the University of Groningen (the Netherlands), and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion (MPI-CEC, Germany). After obtaining her PhD in 2019, she joined the University of Cambridge (UK) in September 2019 as a BBSRC Postdoctoral Research Associate and subsequently held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (2020–2022), working on biohybrid systems for artificial photosynthesis.

 

In October 2022 she came back to Spain and started her independent career with a “La Caixa Junior Leader Incoming Fellowship” and recently with a Ramón y Cajal (since January 2023) at ICIQ and URV.

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Throughout her research career, Carla has worked at eight internationally recognized institutions across six countries: Spain, Sweden, the USA, the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK. She has authored more than 40 scientific publications in leading international journals, including Nature Chemistry, Chem, Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Angewandte Chemie International Edition. Her achievements also include two book chapters and two granted patents, one of which has been licensed and transferred to a spin-off company for industrial development. She has delivered over 80 communications at national and international conferences, including 47 invited lectures, and has participated in more than 10 national and international research projects. She is also involved in teaching, international collaborations, editorial and reviewing activities, event organization, and science outreach.

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Since establishing her independent research group in October 2022, she has secured approximately €3 million in research funding through competitive national and international grants. She is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the ERC Starting Grant 2025 BIOPOLE (ERC-StG-2025), hosted at URV. She is also one of the six PIs involved in the AHEAD project (AIA2025-163492-C54), which applies artificial intelligence to physical systems and is funded through the 2025 Proyectos en el Ámbito de la Inteligencia Artificial call.

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Her other research projects include BiPolPhotoCO2, funded by the BBVA Leonardo 2024 programme, and BiSoRAP (PID2022-142975OA-I00), funded through the 2022 Spanish Proyectos de Generación de Conocimiento call, both of which she leads as PI. She is also a PI in comSCIAM (Computational Science and Applied Mathematics), an interdisciplinary consortium funded through the 2025 URV-AGAUR programme for interdisciplinary research groups. In addition, she led the PHOTOSCALE project (FEDER AGAUR 2021 PROD 00043) as entrepreneurial PI and is the PI of the Ramón y Cajal project (RYC2021-030935-I).

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In 2023, she received the Young Investigator Prize from the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry (RSEQ) and the Emerging Scientific Talent Prize from the Catalan Chemical Society (SCQ). In 2026, she was shortlisted for the RSEQ-Lilly Early Career Prize and the Premio Princesa de Girona Investigación.