The Rector of the University of Santiago de Compostela, Juan Casares Long, and the Regional Minister of Culture, Education and University, Jesús Vázquez Abad, signed an agreement for supplementary support to academic researchers who are leaders of either ERC Starting Grants or national Consolider projects.
One of the awardees is CIQUS PI Francisco Rivadulla, who is also a member of the Magnetism and Nanotechnology USC Research Group (NANOMAG). The new grant provided by the Galician Government will feature additional 150,000 EUR in three years.
Starting Grants Program of the European Research Council is a prestigious grant to support the creation of independent research groups for young researchers developing new ideas on the frontier of knowledge. The proposal of Francisco Rivadulla was awarded in 2010 with 1.47 million EUR for 5 years, being at the time the first Starting Grant from the University of Santiago de Compostela and the second one in Galicia.
His project aims to develop new thermoelectric materials, which can convert electrical energy into heat and vice versa, to produce electricity from heat from industrial processes in a cleaner and more competitive way.
Although thermoelectric materials are well known and have been used for many years, even in the field of space engineering, the problem is that even they are reliable, their performance is quite small and they are expensive.
Rivadulla proposes to develop a new solution with higher performance based on layered and field modulated nanostructures of strongly correlated electron systems.
http://xornal.usc.es/xornal/acontece/2012_06/noticia_0122.html