On July 19th, the granted projects have been announced at the ICMAB Sala d'Actes Carles Miravitlles, in an event hosted by the ICMAB Director, Xavier Obradors, and the Strategic Managing Unit, Jorge Pérez and Montse Salas. 

The FIP projects belong to a Strategic Priority Action within the FUNMAT "Smart Functional Materials for Social Grand Challenges" Severo Ochoa programme. They are the first internal competitive calls in ICMAB, and are aimed to develop new cutting-edge research concepts and ideas with potential for technological innovation, and to the early detection of new areas of knowledge and radical new technologies that may end up in the market. 

They can be individual or collaborative projects, with a maximum budget of 70.000 € with a duration of 12 or 24 months. The budget can include PhD or Postdoc researchers, or other technical personnel, and other direct costs, such as consumables, equipment, travel expenses and dissemination and outreach activities. The call was open from February to March, and since then the projects have been evaluated by an external Committee and by the Scientific Executive Board (SEB) at ICMAB. 

The projects have been scored by external evaluators, under the following criteria: EXCELLENCE (ambition, innovation and risk; methodology; alignment with FUNMAT’s Strategic Plan and vision), IMPACT (impact and relevance of the expected results; future European leadership; consolidation/creation of synergies and collaborations) and FEASIBILITY (work plan and assigned resources; appropriateness and experience of the principal investigator and working team).

The granted FIP projects of this call are the following: 

• Gervasi HERRANZ / Martí GICH: “Enabling Multifunctional Plasmonics on Hybrid Artificial Si-Integrated Systems” (EMPHASIS)
• Imma RATERA / Judith GUASCH: “Biomimetic Lymph Nodes for Cancer Immunotherapy” (IMMUNODYNAMICS)
• Jaume GÀZQUEZ: “Revealing magnetism in real space at atomic resolution with aberrated electron probes” (MAGNETOPROBE)
• Jose Luis GARCíA-MUÑOZ: “Fabrication of high-temperature magnetoelectric multiferroic crystals with incommensurate magnetic spirals” (HOTMULTICRISTAL)
• Mariano CAMPOY / Anna ROIG: “Thermoelectric composites” (THERMOPAPER)
• Riccardo RURALI: “A oxide hybrid heat transistor” (OXHEAT)
• Rosario NUÑEZ / Gerard TOBIAS: “Boron Enriched Carbon nanoMAterials as Theranostic Agents for biomedical imaging and BNCT” (BECMATA)
• Sebastian REPARAZ / Isabel ALONSO: “Exploring the frontiers of thermal transport detection” (EXPLOTHRA)

Three of the eight granted projects are collaborative between different research groups, two more are between two principal investigators, and three are individual.

The topics of the projects are clearly cutting-edge research, combining different types of materials (oxides, organic, inorganic...) and different applications (energy, medicine, electronics, photonics..): plasmonics in hybrid systems, materials for cancer therapy, atomic resolution of magnetic phenomena, multiferroic crystals with magnetic spirals, organic thermoelectric materials, hybrid transistors, boron materials for imaging, and detection of thermal transport. 

 Congratulations!