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Congratulations @ERC_Research on its 10k grantee celebrations!!! #ERC10kGrantees.
On this occasion, let me tell you how being a #ERCStG grantee changed my scientific career. It's a short #thread
about going from blue sky science to (hopefully marketable) technology 1/12
On this occasion, let me tell you how being a #ERCStG grantee changed my scientific career. It's a short #thread
about going from blue sky science to (hopefully marketable) technology 1/12
Right! So...the year was 2008, and after a PhD with @ProfDaveLeigh and postdoc with @nazariolab, I got a Ramon y Cajal fellowship (a very successful scheme that would be idiotic to get rid of, @astro_duque). Time to start my own lab!
The @ERC_Research had launched StG in 2007 and was the best option to get good funding for new PIs. So I started working on an "original" idea for my application...
Only original don't come easy, so I had to settle on a project that looked very flashy, but in hindsight was an obvious hybrid of my PhD and postdoc work: making rotaxanes out of SWNTs!
I applied THREE times to the #ERCStG program, failed twice...but got the grant in 2012! So no, this story is not so much one of going from success to success as it is one of perseverance.
Let me make it clear that our only aim was to show if/how you could make mechanically interlocked derivatives of SWNTs (MINTs). Nothing more, nothing less. As blue sky as it gets!
One of the main privileges of an @ERC_Research grant is that allows you to put together a team to work on a challenging problem.
In our case, the stars of the game in the early days were @albertodejuan and @_Allop_.
In our case, the stars of the game in the early days were @albertodejuan and @_Allop_.
We had to learn our way through entirely new (to us) techniques...and SUCEEDED!!! Our first report on the synthesis of MINTs was published @angew_chem in 2014: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/anie.201402258
From then, we showed that you can make MINTs using almost any molecular fragment that will stick to SWNTs ( https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/cs/c8cs00888d#!divAbstract) and focused on finding out if this new technology was useful in any of the many fields were SWNTs had not lived up to their expectations.
In 2016, in collaboration with @DPisignano and @MNGMaterials, we discovered that MINTs were superior polymer fillers, reinforcing polystyrene >200% with as little as 0.01% w/w... EX-CI-TING!!! We published those results in @acsnano https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsnano.6b04028.
That paper kickstarted our collaboration with http://www.nanocore.com in 2017. Yes: a PAPER got us collaborating with a company. Then we got a #ERCPoC (thanks @ERC_Research again!) and right now we are running a >3M€, 3y project with fully private funding from our Danish friends
We really hope we can make a difference to peoples' lives with our technology! And we are already creating jobs and contributing to the EU economy....all starting with @ERC_Research funding! So here's to many more than #ERC10kGrantees and to a very successful @EUeic launch! 12/12
Bonus tweet: it was our second ERC PoC application that was successful, the first one failed. And in the meantime, I also applied to @ERC_Research #ERCCoG program, got to the interview stage...and also failed!
Bonus tweet #2: through these years I have had the chance to host >30 extremely talented people in my group @IMDEA_Nano. Working with them has been the best part of this journey, without a doubt. Thanks to each and everyone of them!
