BIST Forum: A day to celebrate scientific cooperation

• Dr. Katherine Villa participates in a roundtable with other ERC awardees
• ICIQ collaborates with three of the five selected BIST Ignite Projects

This Thursday, 11^th of January, the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST) presented the first edition of the BIST Forum, an event to show the frontier research done in the BIST centres and its relation with knowledge, technology transfer and society. In this event, it also was announced the winners of the BIST Ignite Programme.

The BIST Forum started with an institutional opening by Rt. Hon. Pere Aragonès, President of Catalonia. Aragonès highlighted the challenges that face science in our days, the importance of Catalonia’s research ecosystem and the collaboration between research centres.

“We have scientific research infrastructures that place us at the first level from a European point of view, some inaugurated recently, and others with expansions that will come in the future, as is the case of the Centre Català per a la Descarbonització de la Indústria, where the ICIQ has a prominent role” pointed Aragonès.

The event followed by a recognition of the European Research Council (ERC) Awardees of the year 2023 and a roundtable entitled “From Frontier Research to Knowledge” gathering members from the BIST Community awarded with an ERC Grant, like Dr. Katherine Villa, group leader from ICIQ. Dr. Villa obtained an ERC Stanting Grant in 2022 for Photoswim, a project that aims to develop autonomous nanoswimmers that carry their own energy source to keep moving and functioning in the dark.

“Once I got the ERC grant, I decided to stay an ICIQ because mainly three reasons: Cutting edge facilities, the reputation of the centre and the full support received from the institution,” explained Dr. Villa.

Following, the roundtable “From Frontier Research to the Economy” highlighted the work done by Pulmobiotics, Ona Therapeutics, and Lux Quanta, the three start-ups from the BIST community that have won the Premi Nacional de Recerca a la Innovació. And after that, Prof. Núria Montserrat ICREA Research Professor at IBEC and Premi Nacional de Recerca al Talent Jove 2020, made an inspirational speech “From Frontier Research to Society”.

The event ended with the presentation of the winners of the BIST Ignite Programme.

This programme awards excellent, multidisciplinary projects within the BIST community. The call is competitive and successful projects always involve new collaborations among researchers within the BIST centres, share knowledge among different scientific fields, and address novel research topics.

At the BIST Forum were announced the selected BIST Ignite projects from the 6^th edition, five project ideas selected to be funded with 20.000€ each. ICIQ researchers participate in three of the selected projects:

• NANOLYMPICS The NANOswimmer OLYMPICS: Real-Time Tracking of the Photophysics and Photocatalytic Performance of Nanoscale Swimmers
  A collaboration between the group of Prof. Nicoletta Liguori, from ICFO, and the group of Dr. Katherine Villa at ICIQ.
• DendriPhotoSomes Chloroplast-mimetic dendrimersome: toward artificial photosynthesis
  A proposal by Prof. César Rodriguez-Emmenegger, from IBEC, and Prof. Pau Ballester, from ICIQ.
• MOLOPEC Molecular Catalysts to Enable Organic Photoelectrodes for Efficient Photoelectrochemical H2 Production and CO2 Reduction
  A multidisciplinary project between ICFO, ICN2 and ICIQ, represented by Dr. Sergi Grau, postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Antoni Llobet.

“This is the third BIST Ignite project achieved by the group. The experience has been very positive in the other two editions. These projects allowed us to start interdisciplinary collaborations with other BIST centres that would certainly not take place on their own and to have access to the knowledge being developed in other disciplines quite far from our current research field. We are very excited to see the outcome of this new one!,” declares the member of the DendriPhotoSomes project Dr. Gemma Aragay, Prof. Ballester’s Group Scientific Coordinator, and project leader of the BIST Ignite Project MAKI that won the BIST Ignite Award in 2022.