The COST TO-BE Spring Meeting 2018 will be co-organized by our researcher Mariona Coll (ICMAB)  and will be held in Hotel Eden Roc, Sant Feliu, Spain 12-14^th March 2018. The meeting, which will be the last one of the series organised by the TO-BE consortium, will be the stage for the presentation of the contents of the Roadmap “Towards oxide electronics” prepared within the context of TO-BE Cost Action. 

The different contributions to the Roadmap will be presented by the corresponding authors. The meeting will also offer the opportunity to present latest results by attendants on the general topics of “Fundamental Understanding: Theory and Experiments”, “Oxides Growth and Fabrication Methods”, “Oxides Applications”.

Participation at the meeting is free of charge and is open to scientists, both from the public research sector and from the private sector. Support for travel and subsistence will be offered to a limited numbers of participants. Requests for support should be made before the deadline, together with the abstract submission.

Register here and submit your abstract before January 1, 2018!

Right after this TO-BE Spring Meeting, Mariona Coll (ICMAB) co-organizes at the same venue the “Technologies for Oxide Electronics School 2018”, on 15-17^th March 2018, to discuss about potentialities, needs and bottlenecks of oxide electronics and the new opportunities that they offer in many emergent fields. 

Important dates: 

• 01-01-2018: ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE

• 01-01-2018: PARTICIPATION TO-BE GRANT REQUEST DEADLINE

• 22-01-2018: NOTIFICATION OF ABSTRACTS ACCEPTANCE

• 22-01-2018: ASSIGNMENT OF TO-BE PARTICIPATION GRANTS

• 03-02-2018: DEADLINE FOR REGISTRATION (*)

• 03-02-2018: DEADLINE FOR HOTEL BOOKING (*)

• (*) Attendance limited to 120 max. First registered first served.

More information in the COST TO-BE website: https://congresses.icmab.es/tobe2018/

HERLALD  (Hooking together European Research in Atomic Layer Deposition), a COST Action that aims to structure and integrate European research activity in ALD (Atomic Layer Deposition), organizes the 2nd HERALD.ECI Workshop with hands-on training for “bonding HERALD.ECIs from ideas to proposals”, which will be held at ICMAB on 1-2 March 2018. 

Deadline for registration: 15 February 2018

About HERALD.ECI

So far, over a 150 researchers from academia and industry are taking part in HERALD and we welcome new members. If you would like to take part, please sign up here.

Within HERALD, the ECI (Early Career Investigator) network aims to promote the next generation of young ALD scientists and help to establish themselves as research leaders in the ALD community. If you want to become a member of the HERALD.ECI network, please contact the ECI committee at heraldeci@gmail.com and join our HERALD.ECI group on LinkedIn. Broadening out the COST definition of ECI, we welcome investigators from within a year of submitting their PhD dissertation to PhD +10 years. 

About the HERALD workshop

The main objective of this 2nd HERALD.ECI Workshop with hands-on training is to create an ignition point for competitive proposals resulting in joint, EU-funded research projects under ECI (early career investigator) participation or leadership.

We want the trainees to:

• gain advanced ‘theoretical’ knowledge input on how to write competitive proposals & manage EU-funded projects from an EU funding expert & Horizon 2020 coach through an impulse talk plus interactive proposal clinics.
• find excellent, perfectly matching collaboration/ project partners during a welcome mixer.
• exchange experiences with an excellent (female) ALD expert and with an industry partner.
• transfer the newly gained knowledge into advanced ‘practical’ skills by
  developing joint proposal ideas,
  transitioning specific ideas into concrete proposal drafts, and
  starting to write
  together in smaller, matched collaboration/ project groups.
• go home with a raw outline and concrete idea description, i. e. the first step of an actual proposal.

Organizing Committee

The 2nd HERALD.ECI Workshop is organized by researchers from ICMAB, Ruhr-University Bochum and Technische Universität Dresden:

• Mariona Coll, Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona (ICMAB)
• Jaume Gazquez, Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona (ICMAB)
• Maximilian Gebhard, Ruhr-University Bochum
• Marcel Junige, Technische Universität Dresden.

Registration

The online registration is now open until February 15, 2018. Click here for more information. 

Yesterday, SUMAN group inaugurate OXOLUTIA’s new industrial site at Barberà del Vallès.

The group enjoyed the lab tour carried out by Roxana Vland and the CEO (Albert Calleja)’s talk entitled  “From lab to fab: the OXOLUTIA case”. The people was very participative and put a lot of questions!

After the visit, we celebrated the traditional SUMAN’s Christmas lunch. 

Last week, Prof. Teresa Puig and our PhD student, Alexander Stangl, attended to the 30th International Symposium on Superconductivity held at IINO HALL&CONFERENCE CENTER in Tokyo, Japan on December 13-1.

Prof. Teresa Puig presented an invited lecture entitled: “Progress in low cost chemical solution Nanocomposite YBa2Cu3O7-x coated conductors” and Alexander Stanl an oral presentation entitled: “Study of oxygen exchange kinetics of YBa2Cu3O7-δ films to achieve high carrier concentration”

La nostra investigadora, Dra. Susagna Ricart, participarà avui 30 de novembre  a les 19h30 al debat de ciència i pensament que organitza l’Espai de Lliure Creació Carme Malaret. No hi falteu!

Our researcher, Dr. Mariona Coll, has been awarded with the Research Award L’Oréal-Unesco “For Women in Science” 2017. The awards ceremony took place this last Wednesday, 22 November, in Madrid. Mariona will receive 15.000 € that will be invested in her research project which “can contribute to one of the most important challenges of this century: find a new energy system for the production of clean energy”. 

Mariona Coll, and her research project on the development of new materials for the conversion of solar energy, carried out at SUMAN-ICMAB, has been awarded with one of the five Research Awards L’Oréal-Unesco “For Women in Science”. Mariona studied Chemistry at the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) and did her PhD in Chemistry at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and SUMAN-ICMAB, on the development of superconducting materials. She then was a postdoc in USA (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology, University of Maryland) and in Europe (IFWDresden, University of Hamburg, ICMS-CSIC), before coming back to SUMAN-ICMAB.

At SUMAN-ICMAB, Mariona is currently researching new materials capable of converting the solar light into electrical energy in a more efficient way than the current materials used nowadays in solar cells (mainly crystalline silicon), by combining nanotechnology with low cost chemistry-based methods.

The awards ceremony was built upon the question “How can we make that young girls fall in love with STEM?”, since the “For Women in Science” program has been for 17 years working on enhancing the visibility of women in science, and this year was specially focused in STEM: its goal is to reach the 50 % women in the STEM university studies (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

RESEARCH AWARDS For Women in Science 2017:

The full list of this year’s Research Awards is the following: 

• Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC), Mariona Coll.
• Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Eva Mª Fernández.
• Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC), Maia Garcia Vergniory.
• Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), Mª del Prado Martín Moruno.
• Instituto de Física Corpuscular (IFIC, CSIC-Universidad de Valencia), Mariam Tórtola.

In the press:

• El País (Materia): Hay niñas que sí sueñan con ser como Marie Curie
• La Vanguardia: L’Oréal lanza una campaña para impulsar la presencia de mujeres en las carreras de ciencia y tecnología
• Cosmopolitan: Estas científicas pueden cambiar tu vida
• El Mundo: “Las mujeres podemos, queremos y sabemos hacer ciencia”
• Quo: L’ORÉAL ENTREGA LOS PREMIOS FOR WOMEN SCIENCE A CINCO DESTACADAS CIENTÍFICAS ESPAÑOLAS
• El Confidencial: Astrofísica y materiales, especialidades de las premiadas por L’Oréal-UNESCO
• Sinc: Cinco-investigadoras-espanolas-reciben-el-premio-L-Oreal-Unesco2
• Expansión: Así es la campaña para conseguir que las niñas accedan a carreras de Ciencias
• El9NOU: 

Dr. Joffre Gutierrez has recently obtained a mobility grant Jose Castillejo for young researchers from the Spanish Ministerio de educacion, cultura y deporte. Thanks to this grant, Dr. Gutierrez will work for six months with Prof. Xiaolin Wang at the Institute for superconducting and electronic materials at the University of Wollongong (Australia). There, he will perform a study of the vortex pinning of REBa2Cu3O7-x films and tapes at magnetic fields up to 14T and under high hydrostatic pressure (1.5 GPa) with the aim to identify the best microstructure for the working conditions found at the future circular collider at CERN