Elena Briñas Gutiérrez was born in 1997 in Ciudad Real, Spain. She obtained his Environmental Science Degree in 2020 at the University of Castilla -La Mancha (UCLM). She enjoyed a mobility grant, so she completed her third year in Mexico in BUAP (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla).

She defended her final degree project titled “Proposal of a new analytical methodology for the determination of platinum nanoparticles (PtNPs) in road dust,” supervised by Prof. Nuria Rodríguez Fariñas and Ph.D. student Armando Sánchez Cachero. In this work, an experimental design was carried out for extraction, detection, characterization, and determination of PtNPs in road dust samples. This project was her first contact with the nanoscience and nanotechnology world.

In December 2020, she received the training grant for master’s degree students awarded by IRICA (Instituto Regional de Investigación Científica Aplicada) while she studied a master’s degree at IREC (Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos). She presented a project titled “SERS methodology for the quantification of graphene oxide in aqueous samples.” In this study, she developed a methodology for the quantification of graphene oxide using SERS. She has worked with carbon nanomaterials and has used the Raman instrument successfully. This work was in collaboration between analytical chemistry and organic chemistry areas, under the supervision of Prof. María Antonia Herrero Chamorro and Prof. Mohammed Zougagh Zariouh.

In September 2021, she began her Ph.D. in Sustainable Chemistry with the thesis titled “Nanomaterials quantification by SERS in real environments” under the supervision of Prof. María Antonia Herrero Chamorro and Prof. Mohammed Zougagh Zariouh.