With the start of the new academic year, ICIQ welcomes two researchers as ”la Caixa” Junior Leaders to the institute: Dr. Katherine Villa and Dr. Fabio Juliá.

Dr. Villa worked as a senior scientist at the Advanced Functional Nanorobots group led by Prof. Martin Pumera at University of Chemistry and Technology (Czech Republic) before joining ICIQ as a postdoc in the Galán-Mascarós group. Now, she will lead the project “Advanced photocatalytic materials for energy and environmental applications.” Dr. Juliá, who was working as a postdoc in the group of Prof. Tobias Ritter at the Max Planck Institute (Germany) before coming to ICIQ as a Junior Leader, will work on “Shining light on Earth-abundant metal complexes: A photochemical route towards sustainable catalysis.”

The ”la Caixa” Junior Leader fellowship programme aims to hire excellent researchers of any nationality who wish to continue their research career in Spain or Portugal in the STEM area. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 847648. The programme works to foster high-quality, innovative research and to support the best scientific talent by providing them with an attractive and competitive environment in which to conduct excellent research. The Junior Leader fellowships programme is divided into two different frames: Incoming and Retaining.

By means of a complementary training programme, these fellowships are intended to consolidate the research skills of the fellows and to foster their independent scientific career. This way, the Junior Leader fellows have to pursue a mandatory secondment in a different institution to increase their transversal skills. These secondments, with a duration between 3 to 6 months, must be performed in an international or intersectorial institution.