Horizon 2020, European Research Council, Global/EU

The National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Bio-Inspired Materials was established in 2014 to be an internationally recognized hub for smart materials research, education, and innovation. In March 2020, NCCR’s Bioinspired Materials Principal Investigator, Professor Francesco Stellacci (from Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausann) won the prestigious Advanced Grant by the European Research Council. The award is only given to candidates who are senior research leaders with significant research achievements in the last 10 years. Setallaci received the maximum grant amount which is worth more than $2,700,000 and will fund research that focuses on nature-inspired polymer recycling over the next five years. The goal of Professor Stellacci’s Nature-inspired Circular Recycling for Polymers (NaCRe) project is to establish a new paradigm for plastic recycling. It seeks to recycle plastics’ main chemical component, polymers, in a same way nature does with proteins. This grant is awarded through the EU research and innovation program, called Horizon 2020. Recipients will conduct their projects at universities and research centers across 20 EU Member States and associated countries. ERC competitions are open to researchers of any nationality. In this round, 185 scientists and scholars from 26 nationalities were selected from a pool of 1,900 researcher applications. Approximately $490,000,000 was awarded in total.

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