Dr. Catherine Raptopoulou Catherine Raptopoulou holds Chemistry degree from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (1987) and PhD in Inorganic Chemistry from the same university (1992) on biomimetic complexes of the manganese center in photosystem II and molybdenum-copper antagonism in biological systems. She was postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Crystallography, Institute of Materials Science, NCSR "Demokritos" (1992-1999) and Collaborating Researcher at the same lab (2000-2004). Since 2005 is a research scientist at the IMS and since 2013 is Director of Research at the INN. Her research focuses on the synthesis and study of coordination compounds with relevance to various fields including bioinorganic and materials chemistry, molecular magnetism, structure-properties relationship, reactivity of chemical systems and crystal engineering. She has been involved in 7 Ph.D. theses (2 as supervisor) and 1 M.D. thesis. She has published 496 papers in international peer-reviewed scientific journals with more than 7700 hetero-citations and h-index of 44 (Jun 2016). From 2011 and for each year, she is included in the top 200 scientists who have published more than 500 crystal structures in the Cambridge Structural Database. She was co-guest editor of the special issue "The Impact of Crystallography on Inorganic Chemistry in Greece", Polyhedron, 2009, Vol. 28(15), and member of the Editorial Board of Jacobs Journal of Inorganic Chemistry and Current Inorganic Chemistry.
Molecular magnets constitute a new class of materials based on molecular lattices which bear unpaired electrons, located either in s- or p-orbitals (organic magnets) or in d- or f-orbitals involving transition, lanthanide or even actinide metal ions. These materials can be easily synthesized by using molecular chemistry techniques and in comparison to nanoparticles of similar size, exhibit high monodispersity in size, volume, shape and charge, high solubility in common solvents and possibility of fine-tuning of their properties through chemical modification of their structure. With regard to the magnetic properties, such molecular systems exhibit features which might be considered both in classical as well as in quantum regime. Beside the scientific interest regarding the underlying physics of molecular materials, they have been also proposed as candidates for a series of applications related to their magnetic properties, qubits for quantum computing, new materials for high-density magnetic storage devices and magnetic refrigerants as well as possible MRI contrast agents.