Dr. Alan Aguirre-Soto

School of Engineering and Sciences Tecnologico de Monterrey

Dr. Alan Aguirre-Soto studied Chemical Engineering with minor in Polymers at Tecnologico de Monterrey (Tec) and Applied Chemistry at the University of Reutlingen, Germany. He did an REU at the University of Colorado Boulder in Prof. Chris Bowman's group. Then, he became founding president of the 1st Latin American Student Chapter of AIChE, 2nd International Chapter of AIChE. He earned MSc and PhD degrees in Chemical Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder focusing on photocatalytic mechanisms for polymer synthesis in Jeff Stansbury’s group. He supervised a bachelor's thesis awarded for undergraduate mentorship. He was featured as Young Professional of the Month by AIChE on the ChEnected website and initiated an AIChE-funded group stemming from the Solar Army initiative at Caltech. He transitioned to a postdoc in the Sikes’ group at MIT Chemical Engineering, where he used his expertise in photochemistry, photocatalysis, and photopolymerizations for biomolecular recognition through polymerization-based signal amplification. He completed the Kaufman Teaching Certificate Program at MIT and the Wolfram Research Science Track. In 2017, he became a faculty of Chemical Engineering at Tec, where he is affiliated to the Nanodevices cluster and the Graduate Programs in Nanotechnology. He has been a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (SNI) Level I since 2017. Later, he was a visiting research scholar at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Harvard/Massachusetts General Hospital working on photochemical tissue-bonding with Irene Kochevar. He is PI of the Macromolecular and Photo-sciences group and began as the director of the Nanotechnology Graduate Programs in 2023.