The Cuban Academy of Sciences -ACC-, mourned the death of Mayra Paulina Hernández Sánchez, Doctor in physical sciences and Principal Researcher.
Sincere condolences from the Academy to family, friends, coworkers, Mayra, will always be in our memories and scientific memory of our country, says the institution in the information about her personality, sent to the Cuban News Agency.
She was an exceptional scientist, very active and beloved by the Section of Natural and Exact Sciences of the ACC, one of its full academics, born on July 1, 1954 and became a full professor at the Institute of Materials Science and Technology, of the University of Havana, where she graduated in Physics in 1978 and PhD in Physical Sciences in 2000.
She worked on the physical-chemical, structural and electronic characterization at the atomic level of materials with applications in biology, medicine and materials science.
Specifically, she dedicated herself to the study of solid surfaces and interfaces through the use of techniques related to microscopy (SEM, TEM, STM and AFM) as well as electrical and spectroscopic photoemission measurements (XPS, ARXPS, UPS and XANES).
Since 1974, she has conducted research in collaboration with colleagues from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the Humboldt University (Germany), the National Synchrotron Light Laboratory (Brazil), and the Optical Research Centers (CIOP, Argentina) and the Polytechnic (Austria), among others.
She belonged to the IMRE Scientific Council from 2003 to 2009 and was its president from 2006 to 2009, to the Scientific Council of the University of Havana since 2009 and to the IMRE Academic Committee since 2000.
Since 2009, she has led the Nano Group of the Nano Materials Division of IMRE, served as tutor for 30 theses distributed in undergraduate, master’s and doctoral programs and given more than 15 specialized conferences in several countries.
She is the author of 70 scientific publications, mainly in high-impact journals indexed with an H index of 8 and more than 185 citations, and a member of the Cuban Physics and Chemistry Societies.
In 2010, she received the Carlos J. Finlay Order, the status of Emeritus Researcher of the University of Havana, for her notable research, the annual National Prize of the Cuban Academy of Sciences on 6 occasions, and the prestigious Sofía Kovalevskaya International Prize (2016) for Outstanding Women in Basic Sciences.
