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BIST awards additional three Ignite projects

img-slide-ignite-1bThree additional winning projects of the first BIST Ignite call have been announced and will receive 20,000€ each to develop their proposals.

At the BIST Founding Conference on March 31st, BIST announced five winning proposals for the first BIST Ignite call. During the announcement, Dr. Pau Gorostiza, Chair of the Ignite Call Evaluation Committee, requested of the BIST Director, Dr. Miquel A. Pericàs, to consider searching for additional funding in order to award another three Ignite projects as the caliber of proposals was extremely high and it was difficult to choose only five winners.

BIST was able to secure the additional funding and has awarded the following three additional projects with the 2017 Ignite grant:
Enlightening TANGO (eTANGO), a collaboration of Felix Campelo (ICFO) and Ishier Roate (CRG)
Continuous flow oxidation processes via plasmon-assisted photocatalysis (OxiFlowPas), a collaboration of Romain Quidant (ICFO) and Miquel A. Pericàs (ICIQ)
In-situ atomic resolution transmission electron microscopy of heterogeneous water oxidation catalysts (inWOC), a collaboration of Jose Ramon Galan-Mascaros (ICIQ) and Jordi Arbiol (ICN2)
Congratulations to all three project collaborations!


Project summaries:
eTANGO will employ a multidisciplinary approach that combines state-of-the-art genetic manipulations of the protein TANGO1 and its binding partners together with advanced optical techniques and biophysical modeling to monitor the organization and dynamics of collagen export from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). By merging the know-how of the collaboration, eTANGO will be able to provide for the first time a quantitative description of the spatiotemporal events that lead to collagen export from the ER.

OxiFlowPas aims at combining for the first time the latest advances of nano-plasmonics and flow catalysis to develop a novel cost/energy effective and environmentally friendly platform compatible with the synthesis of widely used chemicals. The field of catalysis has become crucial in the scale-up process of chemical reactions that produce the building blocks used in everyday life products. Unfortunately, many employed processes are critically energy demanding (and thus costly) and not environmentally friendly. This collaboration hopes to work towards changing this.

inWOC aims to answer fundamental questions about water splitting and solar fuels. Water oxidation is considered the bottleneck in the development of an efficient and cost-effective water splitting technology for the production of renewable fuels. One of the challenges resides in substituting heterogeneous noble metal catalysts by earth-abundant counterparts, maintaining the efficiency and performance required for technological applications. inWOC aims tackle this important problem.


More about the Ignite Program:
The BIST Ignite Program is an initiative to promote multidisciplinary research through the collaboration of diverse teams from multiple research institutes, including BIST centres and external ones. The initiative takes place in two phases: in the first phase, the eight selected projects that have been announced will receive 20,000 € each and by the end of 2017, the projects with the highest potential will be selected to receive additional funding of 50,000 € each.

More information on our Ignite Program webpage.