•Notícia

The UPC is the Catalan institution with the most Horizon 2020 projects according to a report on funding under the EU framework programme for 2014-2015 produced by the CDTI, a public business entity under the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) that is tasked with promoting the internationalisation of Spanish technology. H2020—the main instrument used to fund research, technological development, demonstration projects, and innovation in Europe—has a budget of over €74 million for the 2014-2020 period.

In the first calls issued under the programme (for 2014-2015), Catalan universities received 27% of the funding provided (€84 million), which went to support 192 projects. The UPC is participating in 41 of these and is the leader of 13. In total, the UPC currently has 61 projects that have been awarded H2020 funding.

According to the CDTI report, the ten Catalan institutions with the most projects also include the Barcelona Supercomputing Center–Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), with 36 projects, and the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), with 21 projects. Both of these research centres are associated with the UPC.

The report indicates that 36% of the funding obtained by Catalonia in the 2014-2015 calls is to support research under the Excellent Science pillar, mostly within the framework of projects led by universities and research centres. Excellent Science is the area in which the UPC has the most projects (23). Three of these have been awarded Consolidator Grants by the European Research Council (ERC) and another has received a Starting Grant from the EU funding body.

The project “Epithelial cell sheets as engineering materials: mechanics, resilience and malleability (EpiMech)”, carried out by Marino Arroyo, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and researcher with the Laboratory of Computational Methods and the Nanoengineering Research Centre, was awarded a €2-million Consolidator Grant (2015) to develop epithelial devices made of living materials.

Albert Atserias (@atserias) of the UPC’s Department of Computer Science was awarded a €1.7-million Consolidator Grant (2014) to fund a research project entitled “Unified Theory of Algorithmic Relaxations (AUTAR)” over the next five years. The researcher’s goal is to explain why some mathematical optimisation methods run into a brick wall where they do.

Víctor Rotger of the Department of Mathematics was awarded a Consolidator Grant (2015) for the project “Euler systems and the conjectures of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer (BSD), Bloch and Kato”, which is aimed at making progress on one of the seven Millennium Problems—the seven most significant mathematical problems according to the Clay Mathematics Institute. The researcher, who is a member of the Number Theory Research Group, has a budget of €1.4 million to work with.

Irene Arias, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who is attached to the UPC’s Laboratory of Computational Methods and Numerical Analysis, received a €1.5-million Starting Grant (2015) to pursue a project entitled “Enabling flexoelectric engineering through modelling and computation (FLEXOCOMP)”. The aim in this case is to develop an advanced computational infrastructure for quantifying flexoelectricity in solids. Flexoelectricity is an electromechanical property that makes it possible to mimic the functions of piezoelectric materials, but by bending materials rather than applying pressure to them, as occurs in flex lights, for example.

The rest of the UPC's Excellent Science projects are Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, aimed at promoting researcher mobility and supporting the development of research careers and the exchange of knowledge between industry and academia; initiatives related to the development of future and emerging technologies (FET); and research infrastructure.

In the area of industrial leadership, the UPC’s main focus is on information and communication technologies (ICTs). SOMATCH, for example, is a project aimed at providing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) involved in textile design with an intelligent trend hunter that can predict the latest fashion trends around the world by analysing millions of images from social media. The project is led by José Antonio Tornero, director of the Innotex Centre/INTEXTER, and has a budget of €1.2 million. It is estimated that SMEs in the sector could save €8 million a year by using the trend hunter software.

Under the tackling societal challenges pillar, the University is very active in projects related to energy and climate, such as OptimOre, which aims to improve the process for obtaining tungsten and tantalum, minerals used in the manufacture of many electronic devices, including mobile phones. The Manresa School of Engineering (EPSEM) is leading the project, which is coordinated by Josep Oliva, a member of the Sustainable Mining Research Group and a professor in the Department of Mining and Natural Resources, one of the UPC departments that have received most funding.