ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

One of the remaining primary challenges in modern chemistry is the development of clean, energy- and cost-efficient catalytic processes that can allow to convert simple and abundant chemical feedstocks into high value-added products. Given the vast reserves of methane from natural gas, available worldwide, the direct use of the simplest alkane as source of fuels and chemicals could have a great impact in our society. However, methane´s low intrinsic reactivity has rendered its use extremely difficult for purposes beyond aerobic combustion and the production of syngas. Despite some recent advances in the field, a general strategy for a diverse and versatile use of methane is elusive. The overall aim of this proposal is the development of a new paradigm in catalysis which can provide new catalytic processes that allow direct methane functionalization by using it as a methylating reagent in a variety of C-C bond forming reactions. The approach described in this proposal is based on a cooperative interaction between two transition metal complexes in which an early transition metal is responsible for the methane C-H activation and a late transition metal is the actual catalyst of the methylation process. The link between these two processes is a transmetalation step and will be used to transfer the mechanism of typical cross-coupling reactions to the field of methane functionalization. New pathways for the direct use of methane in reactions such as allylic alkylation, conjugate addition, cross-coupling, C-H methylation and alkene hydromethylation will be developed based on this novel bimetallic catalytic strategy. It is envisioned that the proposed research will lead to a new concept at the interface of catalytic cross coupling reactions and C-H activation. It will contribute to the fundamental understanding of these two reactions and will provide the basis for a new technology for energy efficient and environmentally friendly, thus sustainable, methane conversion.

1 999 679 €

Start date: 2020-09-01, End date: 2025-08-31

The global marine ecosystem is being deeply altered by human activity. On the one hand, rising concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases are changing the physical and chemical state of the ocean, exerting pressure from the bottom up. Meanwhile, the global fishery has provided large economic benefits, but in so doing has restructured ecosystems by removing most of the large animal biomass, a major top-down change. Although there has been a tremendous amount of research into isolated aspects of these impacts, the development of a holistic understanding of the full interactions between physics, chemistry, ecology and economic activity might appear impossible, given the myriad complexities. This proposal lays out a strategy to assemble a team of trans-disciplinary expertise, that will develop a unified, data-constrained, grid-based modeling framework to represent the most important interactions of the global human-ocean system. Building this framework requires solving a series of fundamental problems that currently hinder the development of the full model. If these problems can be solved, the resulting model will reveal novel emergent properties and open the doors to a range of previously unexplored questions of high impact across a range of disciplines. Key questions include the ways in which animals interact with oxygen minimum zones with implications for fisheries, the impacts fish harvesting may have on nutrient recycling, spatio-temporal interactions between managed and unmanaged fisheries, and fundamental questions about the relationships between fish price, fishing cost, and multiple markets in a changing world. Just as the first coupled ocean-atmosphere models revealed a wealth of new behaviours, the coupled human-ocean model proposed here has the potential to launch multiple new fields of enquiry. It is hoped that the novel approach will contribute to a paradigm shift that treats human activity as one component within the framework of the Earth System.

1 600 000 €

Start date: 2016-07-01, End date: 2021-12-31

The major goal of this application is to develop the catalytic generation of conceptually-novel carbyne equivalents and related species, and to study their reactivity towards organic matter. The catalytic activation of designed sources will reveal new reactivity rules at carbon that have been missing, not only in the design and discovery of new chemical reactions, but also in their use to build molecular complexity. Our approach will rely on novel activation modes that unlock elusive and useful tools for molecular editing.

2 000 000 €

Start date: 2020-09-01, End date: 2025-08-31

Computer-generated imagery is now ubiquitous in our society, spanning fields such as games and movies, architecture, engineering, or virtual prototyping, while also helping create novel ones such as computational materials. With the increase in computational power and the improvement of acquisition techniques, there has been a paradigm shift in the field towards data-driven techniques, which has yielded an unprecedented level of realism in visual appearance. Unfortunately, this leads to a series of problems, identified in this proposal: First, there is a disconnect between the mathematical representation of the data and any meaningful parameters that humans understand; the captured data is machine-friendly, but not human friendly. Second, the many different acquisition systems lead to heterogeneous formats and very large datasets. And third, real-world appearance functions are usually nonlinear and high-dimensional. As a result, visual appearance datasets are increasingly unfit to editing operations, which limits the creative process for scientists, engineers, artists and practitioners in general. There is an immense gap between the complexity, realism and richness of the captured data, and the flexibility to edit such data. We believe that the current research path leads to a fragmented space of isolated solutions, each tailored to a particular dataset and problem. We propose a research plan at the theoretical, algorithmic and application levels, putting the user at the core. We will learn key relevant appearance features in terms humans understand, from which intuitive, predictable editing spaces, algorithms, and workflows will be defined. In order to ensure usability and foster creativity, we will also extend our research to efficient simulation of visual appearance, exploiting the extra dimensionality of the captured datasets. Achieving our goals will finally enable us to reach the true potential of real-world captured datasets in many aspects of society.

1 629 519 €

Start date: 2016-11-01, End date: 2023-04-30

Epithelial barriers protect the body against physical, chemical, and microbial insults. Intestinal epithelium is one of the most actively renewing tissues in the body and a major site of carcinogenesis. Functional in vitro models of intestinal epithelium have been pursued for a long time. They are key elements in basic research, disease modelling, drug discovery, and tissue replacing and have become prime models for adult stem cell research. By taking advantage of the self-organizing properties of intestinal stem cells, intestinal organoids have been recently established, showing cell renewal’s kinetics resembling to the one found in vivo. However, the development of in vitro 3D tissue equivalents accounting for the dimensions, architecture and access to the luminal contents of the in vivo human intestinal tissue together with its self-renewal properties and cell complexity, remains a challenge. The goal of this project is to engineer intestinal epithelial tissue models that mimic physiological characteristics found in in vivo human intestinal tissue, to open up new areas of research on human intestinal diseases. The proposed models will address the in vivo intestinal epithelial cell renewal and migration, the multicell-type differentiation and the epithelial cell interactions with the underlying basement membrane while providing access to the luminal content to go beyond the state-of-the-art organoid models. To do this, we propose to develop an experimental setup that combines microfabrication techniques, tissue engineering components and recent advances in intestinal stem cell research, exploiting stem cell self-organizing characteristics. We anticipate this setup to recapitulate the 3D morphology, the spatio-chemical gradients and the dynamic microenvironment of the living tissue. We expect the new device to prove useful in understanding cell physiology, adult stem cell behaviour, and organ development as well as in modelling human intestinal diseases.

1 997 190 €

Start date: 2015-12-01, End date: 2021-05-31

"Coordination Chemistry and Molecular Magnetism are in an ideal position for the rational design of Single-Molecule Magnets which can be used as molecular spin qubits, the irreducible components of any quantum technology. Indeed, a major advantage of molecular spin qubits over other candidates stems from the power of Chemistry for a tailored and inexpensive synthesis of systems for their experimental study. In particular, the so-called Lanthanoid-based Single-Ion Magnets, which are currently the hottest topic in Molecular Magnetism, have the potential to be chemically designed, tuning both their single-molecule properties and their crystalline environment. This will allow the independent study of the different quantum processes that cause the loss of quantum information, collectively known as decoherence. The study of quantum decoherence processes in the solid state is necessary both to lay the foundations for next-generation quantum technologies and to answer some fundamental questions. The goals of this project are: #1 To unravel the mechanistic details of decoherence in molecular spin qubits based on mononuclear lanthanoid complexes. This study will stablish criteria for the rational design of single spin qubits. #2 To extend this study to the coupling between two or more spin qubits. This will allow us to explore the use of polynuclear lanthanoid complexes to achieve quantum gates or simple algorithms. #3 To extrapolate to infinite systems formed by the complex organization of spin qubits. This exploratory goal will permit us to move beyond zero-dimensional systems, thus facilitating the advance towards complex quantum functions. "

1 827 375 €

Start date: 2015-08-01, End date: 2021-01-31

To build interfaces between the electronic domain and the human nervous system is one of the most demanding challenges of nowadays engineering. Fascinating developments have already been performed such as visual cortical implants for the blind and cochlear implants for the deaf. Yet implantation of most electrical stimulation systems requires complex surgeries which hamper their use for the development of so-called electroceuticals. More importantly, previously developed systems based on central stimulation units are not adequate for applications in which a large number of sites must be individually stimulated over large and mobile body parts, thus hindering neuroprosthetic solutions for patients suffering paralysis due to spinal cord injury or other neurological disorders. A solution to these challenges could consist in developing addressable single-channel wireless microstimulators which could be implanted with simple procedures such as injection. And, indeed, such solution was proposed and tried in the past. However, previous attempts did not achieve satisfactory success because the developed implants were stiff and too large. Further miniaturization was prevented because of the use of inductive coupling and batteries as energy sources. Here I propose to explore an innovative method for performing electrical stimulation in which the implanted microstimulators will operate as rectifiers of bursts of innocuous high frequency current supplied through skin electrodes shaped as garments. This approach has the potential to reduce the diameter of the implants to one-fifth the diameter of current microstimulators and, more significantly, to allow that most of the implants’ volume consists of materials whose density and flexibility match those of neighbouring living tissues for minimizing invasiveness. In fact, implants based on the proposed method will look like short pieces of flexible thread.

1 999 813 €

Start date: 2017-05-01, End date: 2022-04-30

Lanthanide metals are ubiquitous nowadays, finding use in luminescent materials, optical amplifiers and waveguides, lasers, photovoltaics, rechargeable batteries, catalysts, alloys, magnets, bio-probes, and therapeutic agents. In addition, they bear potential for high temperature superconductivity, magnetic refrigeration, molecular magnetic storage, spintronics and quantum information. Surprisingly, the study of lanthanide physico-chemical properties on surfaces is at its infancy, particularly at the nanoscale. To address this extraordinary scientific opportunity, I will research the foundations and prospects of lanthanide elements to design functional nanoarchitectures on surfaces and I will study their inherent physico-chemical phenomena in distinct coordination environments, targeting novel approaches for sensing, nanomagnetism and electroluminescence. Importantly, our studies will encompass both metal substrates and decoupling surfaces including ultra-thin film insulators and graphene. Nurturing from these studies and in parallel, we will focus on graphene voltage back-gated supports, thus surpassing the seminal knowledge on electrically-inert substrates and enhancing the scope of our research to address the overarching objective of the proposal, i.e., the design of electrically tunable functional lanthanide nanomaterials. The culmination of ELECNANO project will provide strategies for: 1.-Design of functional nanomaterials on high-technological supports. 2.-Development of advanced coordination chemistry on surfaces. 3.-Rationale of the physico-chemical properties of lanthanide-coordination environments. 4.-Engineering of lanthanide nanoarchitectures for ultimate sensing, nanomagnetism and electroluminescence. 5.-In-situ atomistic views of electrically tunable materials and unprecedented fundamental studies of charge-molecule/metal physics on devices.

1 994 713 €

Start date: 2018-09-01, End date: 2023-08-31

Geometric frustration, namely the impossibility of satisfying competing interactions on a lattice, has recently become a topic of considerable interest as it engenders emergent, fundamentally new phenomena and holds the exciting promise of delivering a new class of nanoscale devices based on the motion of magnetic charges. With ENFORCE, I propose to realize two and three dimensional artificial colloidal ices and investigate the fascinating manybody physics of geometric frustration in these mesoscopic structures. I will use these soft matter systems to engineer novel frustrated states through independent control of the single particle positions, lattice topology and collective magnetic coupling. The three project work packages (WPs) will present increasing levels of complexity, challenge and ambition: (i) In WP1, I will demonstrate a way to restore the residual entropy in the square ice, a fundamental longstanding problem in the field. Furthermore, I will miniaturize the square and the honeycomb geometries and investigate the dynamics of thermally excited topological defects and the formation of grain boundaries. (ii) In WP2, I will decimate both lattices and realize mixed coordination geometries, where the similarity between the colloidal and spin ice systems breaks down. I will then develop a novel annealing protocol based on the simultaneous system visualization and magnetic actuation control. (iii) In WP3, I will realize a three dimensional artificial colloidal ice, in which interacting ferromagnetic inclusions will be located in the voids of an inverse opal, and arranged to form the FCC or the pyrochlore lattices. External fields will be used to align, bias and stir these magnetic inclusions while monitoring in situ their orientation and dynamics via laser scanning confocal microscopy. ENFORCE will exploit the accessible time and length scales of the colloidal ice to shed new light on the exciting and interdisciplinary field of geometric frustration.

1 850 298 €

Start date: 2020-01-01, End date: 2024-12-31