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Hurray! Martí Gich awarded with a 2018 ERC Consolidator Grant

We are very excited to announce that the N&N researcher Martí Gich, has been awarded with a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant (CoG) for his project entitled “Ferrites-by-design for Millimeter-wave and Terahertz Technologies” (FeMiT). Martí Gich will carry out his project in the period 2019-2024 with a total of nearly 2 M€ to cover the project costs.

 

All the N&N members are very enthusiastic about the project and wish Marti a lot of success, congratulations!

 

Anna Roig attended the 2018 Albus Scientific Awards Ceremony at Grifols

On 10th Otober 2018 Anna Roig attended the 2018 Albus Scientific Awards Ceremony at Grifols headquarters in Sant Cugat. As one of the two awardees of the 2017 edition, she presented the results on the Albumin-iron oxide nanocages project. Carlos Moya is the post-doc working in this project. This year’s award recipients are:

 

  • Paolo Caraceni, MD, Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna Bologna, Italy
    Project: Long‐term albumin administration in patients with decompensated cirrhosis: clinical and pathophysiological implications
  • Hanadi Sleiman, PhD, Department of Chemistry, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
    Project: Albumin as a passive targeting agent: effect of the protein binding on stability, bio distribution and therapeutic outcome of oligonucleotides and DNA nanoparticles
Anna Roig presenting the project on albumin nanocages

Do you want to do you PhD at the N&N group?

Bacterial Nanocellulose diagram

The call for the PhD grants form the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities “FORMACIÓN DE PROFESORADO UNIVERSITARIO (FPU) 2018” is now open. If you are a highly motivated student with a strong background in chemistry/physics do not hesitate to contact us (alaromaine@icmab.es)! The N&N group is offering a PhD project on the topic “Engineering Bacterial Cellulose Composites” aiming at developing new materials based on bacterial nanocellulose. Join us if you want to take part in this innovative project within an interdisciplinary and dynamic research group!

 

LLAVOR Project was awarded to the Group NN

PLANT HEALING, a project lead by Dr. Anna Laromaine from the Group Nanoparticles and Nanocomposites at the Institut of Materials Science in Barcelona (ICMAB) and in collaboration with the Group of Bacterial pathogens and plant cell death from the Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG), was awarded by Els Fons Europeus de Desenvolupament Regional i el Departament d’Empresa i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya with a grant of 20.000€. The PLANT HEALING 2016 LLAVOR 00052 project will work to offer a novel material that could be implemented in current grafting protocols with no extra time or effort to significantly improve graft efficiency. PLANT HEALING will make an agricultural breakthrough, by developing a new nanocomposite material containing silver nanoparticles linked to bacterial nanocellulose.

 

Published paper about Jan’s work in Warsaw

Congratulations Jan! Today we announce that the previous work of the PhD student Jan Grzelak has been recently published on the journal Nanomaterials . This work is based on the Bachelor’s project he did in Warsaw under the supervision of Dr. Wiktor Lewandowski. 

 

Paper abstract: By coating plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) with thermally responsive liquid crystals (LCs) it is possible to prepare reversibly reconfigurable plasmonic nanomaterials with prospective applications in optoelectronic devices. However, simple and versatile methods to precisely tailor properties of liquid-crystalline nanoparticles (LC NPs) are still required. Here, we report a new method for tuning structural properties of assemblies of nanoparticles grafted with a mixture of promesogenic and alkyl thiols, by varying design of the latter. As a model system, we used Ag and Au nanoparticles that were coated with three-ring promesogenic molecules and dodecanethiol ligand. These LC NPs self-assemble into switchable lamellar (Ag NPs) or tetragonal (Au NPs) aggregates, as determined with small angle X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy. Reconfigurable assemblies of Au NPs with different unit cell symmetry (orthorombic) are formed if hexadecanethiol and 1H,1H,2H,2H-perfluorodecanethiol were used in the place of dodecanethiol; in the case of Ag NPs the use of 11-hydroxyundecanethiol promotes formation of a lamellar structure as in the reference system, although with substantially broader range of thermal stability (140 vs. 90 °C). Our results underline the importance of alkyl ligand functionalities in determining structural properties of liquid-crystalline nanoparticles, and, more generally, broaden the scope of synthetic tools available for tailoring properties of reversibly reconfigurable plasmonic nanomaterials