Andrea Picazo Veciana

Andrea Veciana has a Spanish nationality and was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in October 1994. She grew up in Salvador, Brazil where she graduated from an international high school with honors.

In 2014, Andrea moved to Enschede, the Netherlands to study Advanced Technology at the University of Twente with a focus on nanotechnology. During her bachelor, she did an internship at the Nanostructured Optoelectronic Materials Group at the Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona where she characterized semiconducting polymers crystallized into spherulites with ellipsometry which led to a publication as co-author. She concluded her bachelor’s degree with a bachelor thesis on microfluidic sensors for forensic applications and graduated with an honors program. Her work during the bachelor thesis was published in 2019.

She continued with a master’s degree in Micro- and Nanosystems at ETH Zurich, Switzerland where she focused on applying nanotechnology for environmental monitoring and remediation. There she did an internship at Innovative Sensor Technology where she optimized the fabrication process of temperature and flow sensors. She worked at the Industrial Ecology: Air Quality Control Group at ETH Zurich for her semester thesis, fabricating microsensors for the detection of airborne pollutants. During her master thesis at the MSRL, Andrea worked on embedding magnetoelectric nanoparticles on a functional polymeric membrane to degrade micropollutants from wastewater.

After obtaining her master’s degree, she joined the MSRL in January 2020 as a PhD student. Her current research combines nanorobotics and magnetoelectric materials for water remediation.