• With these three new projects the ICMAB has a total of nine projects of the European Research Council (ERC) currently ongoing.
• This milestone adds to the Severo Ochoa scientific excellence award received last year.
Bellaterra, Friday 25 November 2016. The Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC) located at the UAB campus, has achieved three Consolidators Grants. Three researchers of this institute have received favorable response for funding at the ERC-2016-COG call where more than 2.300 projects were presented according to the ERC.
These three projects are in addition to the 6 projects of the ERC that other researchers from the ICMAB already have (including a Starting Grant obtained this same year 2016 by Alexandre Ponrouch) and the project of scientific excellence Severo Ochoa achieved in 2015.
The three researchers and their projects are:
Núria Aliaga, ICREA Researcher, with a project (Tmol4TRANS) dedicated to the design of molecules, which inserted in nano-transistors based on graphene, will produce efficient conductance at room temperature. It is also expected to optimize the device and production since the hybrid between the molecule and the device will have a high reproducibility. This is a project that wants to encourage the use of molecules in electronic devices that we use every day to improve their performance.
Massimiliano Stengel, ICREA Researcher, with the MULTIFLEXO project whose objective is to advance decisively in the theoretical understanding of flexoelectricity (a phenomenon whereby a material generates electricity by suffering a non-homogeneous deformation, for example by bending) and more generally, of material properties that emerge from a non-uniform distortion. The theoretical study of these properties presents a great challenge that Max Stengel has assumed as a pioneer in the simulation of the first principles of flexoelectricity and he approaches it with an innovative multiscale strategy that integrates quantum-mechanical calculations with a description of solids and nanostructures on a larger scale. The tools that will provide will allow in the future, the design of innovative devices for energy harvesting, innovative transducers and photovoltaic materials with improved properties.
And Gerard Tobias, CSIC Tenured Scientist, with the NEST project that focuses on the preparation of radioactive nanomaterials, smaller than the size of human body cells, for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Depending on the nature of the employed radioactive materials, it is expected that the nanomaterials prepared will allow both an early diagnosis of tumors and their treatment in a localized manner, thus minimizing damage to healthy tissue.
The ERC Consolidator Grant projects support up to 2 million Euros per project, to the research of scientists already consolidated and recognized as exceptional. The aim is to support these researchers to establish or strengthen their excellent research groups so that they continue the development of their career in Europe. The projects selected by this institution are high risk projects that open new paths in their fields of research.
We congratulate them for this award and wish them an even more successful future. With this new success ICMAB has already achieved a total of 9 ERC Grants!
