Severo Ochoa 2020-2023: Smart Functional Materials for a Better Future (FUNFUTURE)

The new Severo Ochoa Certificate of Excellence (2020-2023) is enabling ICMAB to increase its international competitiveness and international visibility. The consolidation of the Communication and Outreach, Knowledge Transfer and Strategic Managing Units, started with the first Severo Ochoa label, are instrumental to that respect. Belonging to the SOMMa Alliance is also promoting more synergies with other centers, also enhancing the impact and visibility of our activities.

With this Severo Ochoa Project, we continue our competitive calls to develop high-risk interdisciplinary internal projects (Frontier Interdisciplinary Projects), which result in new and proof-of-concept topics, and helps keeping our research at the forefront of materials science. We granted seven FIPs in the first call (2 PoC) and ten in the second call (4 PoC). The publications and patents that emerge from this initiative are a seed for future larger projects and industrial collaborations to consolidate cross-cutting research.

We continue to reinforce our scientific platforms and to develop talent attraction programs at all levels (Postdoc, PhD, Master, Undergraduate projects, etc) and training programmes for our young researchers. With this new Severo Ochoa, we are attracting both highly talented researchers and committed support research staff from all over the world to our Institute.

The ICMAB 2020-2023 Strategic Plan in the field of advanced functional materials for a better future is so far generating multiple academic and industrial collaborations and is allowing our research to be more international and competitive. In addition, we are training a good number of competitive professionals that will be inserted in the Spanish R+D+i system.

By the end of 2022, at the Strategic Advisory Board (SAB) Meeting, we renewed our SAB members. We would like to thank the participation to the ones leaving, who have been with us from 2016 and until 2022, welcome the ones joining us from 2022 and of course, thank you the ones who have been with us since 2016 and that continue some more years.

We are in the way of having a fruitful adventure and consolidating our Institute, while also opening new opportunities to make ICMAB a more sustainable, inclusive, diverse, committed and global research center.

During these last years, we have experienced a growth in our staff members, which involve new opportunities and also new challenges. The growth has been especially important in the number of PhD researchers, due to the parallel increase in funding for scientific projects. The number of Postdoctoral researchers has also increased, as well as the number of Master and Undergrad students who do their final projects with us. Although there is a higher number of research support staff (Technicians and General Services staff), the number is still low compared to the scientific staff, involving an overload of paperwork and sample characterization experiments. We also face the challenge of researchers who become Ad Honorem or retire and a still low number of researchers that achieve a permanent position with us, although we are going in the good direction.

The Institute secured a total budget of 18.2 M€ in 2022, the highest budget ever. The competitive budget represents a 48.6 % (8,8 M€), 46.7 % is non-competitive (8.5 M€).

The budget from the European Union represents a 47.9 % of the competitive funding (4.2 M€), and 46.3 % of the competitive budget comes from projects from the Ministry of Science and Innovation (4.1 M€). The rest, 5.8 % (0.5 M€) are from projects from the Catalan government.

The budget from private sources (including contracts and services) represents a 4.7 % of the total budget (0.9M€).

There has been a clear increase in the budget of 2022, due to the EU Next Generation Funds and increase of AEI calls this year, in which our ICMAB researchers have been very successful. Also, it is worth noting that the private funding has tripled this last year compared to the previous ones.