Zagal Moya (born in Talca Chile, December 19, 1949) is a Chilean scientist educated at the University of Chile with postgraduate training in the United States of America with a Ph.D.degree from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Ohio and postdoctoral training at Brookhaven National Laboratory , Upton, New York.
At present he is a Distinguished Professor, Department of Chemistry and Materials,Faculty of Chemistry and Biology, Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH) where he directs the Laboratory of Electrocatalysis since 1982.
He got his Ph.D.
in chemistry Case Western Reserve University, US (1978) and was postdoctoral fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, in 1982.
His main research efforts are focused on the fundamentals of electron transfer reactions that are relevant for energy conversion and sensors.
He has contributed in the area of electrocatalysis, electrodes modified with metal macrocyclics, electrochemistry of biological molecules, the catalysis of the reduction of molecular oxygen and many other reactions of relevance, conductive polymers, electrochemical sensors and in pioneering work in the establishment of non-linear correlations between thermodynamic properties of molecular catalysts and their electrochemical reactivity.
These contributions are essential in the development of non-precious metal catalysts for energy conversion devices and electrochemical sensors.
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He also has contributed in the field of corrosion, conductive polymers and his well-known volcano correlations for the electrocatalytic properties of surface-confined molecular catalysts