Borja Ibarra (BSs in Biochemistry) obtained his PhD. in Molecular Biology from Universidad Autónoma Madrid in 2001. He made the ‘leap’ to molecular biophysics as a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Carlos Bustamante lab at UC Berkeley (USA) where he learned to generate, analyze and interpret single molecule data on complex, multi-state biological systems. Back in Spain in 2007, he applied single molecule manipulation methods as optical tweezers at the CNB-CSIC (Madrid) to study biological molecular motors at single molecule level. He joined the Nanobiosystems research line at IMDEA Nanociencia in 2010, where he started the Molecular Motors Nanomanipulation Lab.
Maxime Ledent completed his Master's degree in Chemistry at the University of Liège in 2019. His Master's thesis focused on advanced chromatography separation techniques, specifically GCxGC-HRTOFMS. He subsequently obtained a Teaching Assistant position under Prof.
Anne-Sophie Duwez, where he pursued his Ph.D. studies from 2019 to 2025. His doctoral research centered on the investigation of synthetic light-driven molecular motors, conducted in collaboration with Prof. Nicolas Giuseppone, Prof. Ben L. Feringa, and Prof. R. Dean Astumian. To study the mechanochemical properties of these rotational motors, he used AFM-based Single-Molecule Force Spectroscopy (SMFS), enabling analysis at the single-molecule level. During his Ph.D., he was also selected for the Foresight fellowship program.
In 2025, Maxime began a postdoctoral fellowship at IMDEA Nanociencia, joining the research groups of Dr. Emilio Pérez and Dr. Borja Ibarra. His current research employs optical tweezers (in Dr. Ibarra's group) to investigate the mechanical and kinetic properties of rotaxanes (synthesized in Dr. Pérez's group) at the unimolecular scale.
