A Coruña, September 4, 2019.- The researcher from the University of A Coruña Elena Pazos, who joined the Academy in 2017 with the Intalent talent recruitment program of UDC and the company Inditex, has just obtained a grant of 1.5 million euros from the European Union to develop a research project to create new intelligent molecular materials that respond to changes in the environment and change their function, as she explained this morning at a press conference at the Rectorate in which she appeared together with the Rector of the UDC, Julio Abalde, and the Deputy for Research of the Vice-Rectorate for Scientific Policy, Research and Transfer, Horacio Naveira.
Elena Pazos will form a research team for which she will hire six new researchers to carry out this European project over the next five years at the Center for Applied Scientific Research (CICA) where she has her laboratory. “We will develop basic science and knowledge to create new materials,” she explained, “in the very long term this knowledge will have applications in electronics and biomedicine.”
The rector highlighted in his speech the value of this researcher and her research projects. “Doing quality science is a strategic objective of the University of A Coruña”, he emphasized, also highlighting the good results obtained by researchers in the InTalent UDC-Inditex talent recruitment program, who in addition to this European aid also obtained two national Ramón y Cajal projects. At this point, Elena Pazos expressly thanked the Inditex company and the University itself for the creation of this program because “it gave me the opportunity to start my own lines of research”.
The European Research Council (ERC) announced yesterday the award of the Starting Grant, a program endowed with 621 million euros. Each year the European Union selects the best talents in science based on the researchers’ curriculum vitae and their promising future as scientists. In this edition, 20 researchers in Spain obtained grants out of a total of 408 scientists granted grants in 51 different countries. Galicia obtained two grants, one from the University of A Coruña and the Institute of Heritage Sciences.
Historically, this is the third Starting Grant that researchers from the University of A Coruña have achieved with the support of the Vice-Rectorate for Scientific Policy, Research and Transfer and, above all, the OTRI.
For his part, Horacio Naveira made a passionate defense of basic science without which, he assured, “there is no future.”
Elena Pazos Chantrero (Marín) obtained her PhD from the University of Santiago de Compostela in 2012 under the supervision of professors José Luís Mascareñas and M. Eugenio Vázquez, working on the synthesis of fluorescent sensors for the detection of some proteins involved in cancer. During her doctoral studies, she was a visiting student at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (United States). Upon completing her PhD, she received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Barrié Foundation that allowed her to join the group of professor Samuel I. Stupp at Northwestern University in the United States, where she carried out research in the field of supramolecular chemistry and bionanotechnology. After her postdoctoral studies, she worked in the spin-off Medcom Advance as a researcher for a year, and in December 2015 she joined the group of professor Ramón Álvarez Puebla at the Technological Center for Chemistry of Catalonia as a TECNIOspring and Marie Curie researcher. Throughout her research career she has published fifteen scientific articles, most of them in high-impact journals in the field of chemistry, and some of her research results have been protected with two patents. In 2017 she joined the University of A Coruña, in the first call for the InTalent UDC-Inditex talent recruitment program.
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