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Jordi Sort awarded an ERC Proof of Concept project

Jordi Sort
Jordi Sort, ICREA researcher at the Department of Physics, was awarded one of the ERC's Proof of Concept grants. ICMAB researcher Teresa Puig was also awarded the same grant.

25/07/2019

The European Research Council (ERC) awarded ICREA researcher Jordi Sort from the Department of Physics of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona one of this year's Proof of Concept grants, dedicated to bringing the market closer to the advances of frontier research.

The €150,000 grant lasts for a period of 18 months and has the objective of bringing research closer to markets, representing an important step towards the transfer of knowledge to the production sector. Jordi Sort, head of the research group in nanomagnetism and nanomechanics at the UAB, received a Consolidator Grant for his project in 2014 (€1.8 M), which was also from the European Research Council and has helped him fund the research largely related to this new Proof of Concept project. The objective of this new project, entitled MAGIC-SWITCH: Magnetic Switch Controlled with Voltage - Towards a Secure and Energy-Efficient Magnetic Device, is to develop a new type of memory for computers with a robust design which minimises energy loss due to overheating. Also this year, Jordi Sort was awarded a European Training Network (€4M) in magneto-electric materials.

Researcher Teresa Puig, from the ICMAB-CSIC located at the UAB campus, was also awarded a Proof of Concept grant for her project entitled IMPACT, Industrial Manufacturing Process for A high temperature superconducting Coated conductors Technology.

The funding of these Proof of Concept grants allow researchers to dispose of additional resources to help them put into practice the innovative and commercial potential of the ideas generated through research projects which had previously been funded by the ERC.

A total of 18 European Research Council grants have gone to UAB researchers. With regard to projects within the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona has obtained grants for a total of 130 projects, all managed by the Office for International Projects and with a total funding of 61.9 million euros. This data places the UAB eighth in the list of over 3,200 entities participating in Spain and third among all universities in Spain. Internationally, the UAB ranks 126 among the more than 31,500 participating entities.