Dr. Gail A. Vinnacombe-Willson was appointed Research Associate in September 2026 after being awarded a Postdoctoral Junior Leader Fellowship from the “la Caixa” Foundation and an Ikerbasque Research Fellowship.;

Dr. Vinnacombe-Willson obtained her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2022, which was jointly advised by Prof. Paul S. Weiss and Prof. Steven J. Jonas, M.D. There, she developed scalable and cleanroom-free nanofabrication approaches and bottom-up syntheses for plasmonic metal nanostructures. She combined these strategies with microfluidics to fabricate platforms for cell capture and release, leading to a patent. Her work received support from the Hyundai Hope on Wheels Scholar Award, UCLA CTSI Core Voucher Award, and a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship.

Dr. Vinnacombe-Willson is a member of the BioNanoPlasmonics laboratory led by Prof. Luis M. Liz-Marzán at CIC biomaGUNE since 2022, supported by ERC Advanced Grant 4D bioSERS and MSCA postdoctoral fellowship PLASMOSTEMFATE. Within these projects, she develops new synthetic routes for metal nanostructures with unique and tuneable light-matter interactions and studies their application in biosensing, bioimaging, and stem cell stimulation in vitro.

Over her career, she carried out research stays at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (supported by an I-LINK 2020+ Grant from CSIC), University of Houston, and University of Texas at Austin, enabling her to build expertise in nanolithography, vibrational and scanning probe microscopies, and stem cell culture.

Dr. Vinnacombe-Willson mentored 3 undergraduate students and supervises 2 PhD students. She has 18 publications, with 7 as first and 6 as corresponding author with an h-index of 12 (i-10 index of 13; Google Scholar & Scopus). She contributed 9 invited lectures, seminars, and talks at international conferences.