CiQUS, CRETUS, and IGFAE secure five Marie Curie grants, among the most prestigious in Europe 

Three centers from the CIGUS Network, an initiative promoted by the Xunta de Galicia that brings together centers in the system that have accredited their scientific excellence, have secured five grants in the latest European ‘Marie Sklodowska Curie’ call. Specifically, three grants will go to the Singular Center for Research in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Materials (CiQUS), one to the Interdisciplinary Research Center in Environmental Technologies (CRETUS), and another to the Galician Institute of High Energy Physics (IGFAE). 

This call, recently resolved, will allocate 417 million euros so that nearly 1,700 postdoctoral researchers from Europe and around the world can develop their own projects while receiving high-level training and supervision. The MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships program is recognised as one of the most prestigious and competitive in Europe and aims to foster research excellence through international mobility and interdisciplinary training. 

Three projects for CiQUS 

Three of the five projects selected by the European Commission belong to CiQUS staff.. The beneficiaries, three postdoctoral researchers, will develop their projects in the center’s laboratories over the next two years. These individuals will thus join the research team from various countries such as India, Portugal, Iran, Colombia, and Guatemala, who have joined CiQUS over the past few years under this program. 

The NANO-MAC project, led by Mafalda Gonçalves (Portugal) under the supervision of Pablo del Pino, aims to develop nanocarriers that mimic macrophages to deliver drugs very selectively to inflamed tissues, with applications in diseases such as ulcerative colitis. Meanwhile, the BOOST project, led by M. Inés Paiva da Silva Leitao (Portugal) and supervised by Javier Montenegro, will explore the use of boron compounds to transport anionic oligonucleotides across cell membranes, opening new avenues in the delivery of nucleic acid-based drugs. Lastly, the McCOFs project, led by Adrindam Mal (India) and supervised by Manuel Souto, will focus on designing high-capacity organic cathodes for lithium batteries using covalent organic frameworks. 

Protecting the oceans, CRETUS’s proposal  

‘Towards the 2030 conservation targets in Europe: An assessment of Management Gaps and Opportunities in Marine Protected Areas (SOS2030)’ is the proposal by researcher Verónica Relano, who received the Marie Curie grant. Relanowill join CRETUS at USC in the team led by Sebastián Villasante, a distinguished Oportunius researcher from the Xunta and coordinator of the ERC EqualSea project. The SOS2030 project seeks to improve the effectiveness of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in Europe, as many of them exist only on paper and do not meet their conservation goals, becoming “paper parks.” 

To address this issue, SOS2030 will create and develop a database, an evaluation tool, a multilingual documentary, and a website, among others. For the first time, the common patterns of paper parks will be comprehensively analysed, providing keys to avoid their creation in the future and enhance the sustainability of coastal communities in Europe and worldwide. Along with USC, Utrecht University and WWF Italy are participating, with support from Onewater. 

IGFAE delves into the knowledge of fundamental forces  

In the Marie Curie call, IGFAE secured another of the grants, specifically for researcher LeiChen under the project ‘Probing nuclear parton dynamics in Heavy-Ion Collisions with Hard Probes” (HIC-HP).’ Lei will delve into the interactions between particle beams and the medium in heavy-ion collisions and their implications for the properties of quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter created shortly after the Big Bang. In this line of work, Lei hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the strong interaction and the properties of quark-gluon plasma, collaborating with the high-energy physics scientific community to deepen the knowledge of fundamental forces. 

Lei Chen joined IGFAE in 2023, under the YoctoLHC project, led by Professor Carlos Salgado and funded by the Advanced Grant call of the European Research Council (ERC). Previously, Lei completed his doctorate at Central China Normal University (Wuhan) and then conducted a postdoctoral stay at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen).