Research Award L’Oréal-Unesco FWIS 2017 for Mariona Coll and her project on new materials for photovoltaics

Written by Mar Tristany on . Posted in News.

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:

Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona ICMAB CSIC

Address

Campus de la UAB, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain
+34 935 801 853 ext 371 
hr_suman@icmab.es