Two young researchers from the University of Granada, Pablo Garrido Barros and Javier Ortiz Tudela, have been awarded ERC Starting Grants, the most prestigious in European science. The programme is endowed with €1.5 million per project and aims to enable researchers to set up their own research groups and complete their projects within five years. ERC Starting Grants are awarded by the European Research Council, the EU institution responsible for the strategy, support and funding of the highest quality European research and innovation. These specific grants –Starting Grants– are awarded to researchers of any nationality with between 2 and 7 years of experience since the completion of their doctoral studies, a promising scientific track record and an innovative and high quality research proposal. These UGR researchers are two such people. Furthermore, the UGR is the only Andalusian university to have received these grants in the 2024 edition.
Pablo Garrido studied Chemical Engineering at the UGR, where he began his research training thanks to several research grants. After graduating in 2013, he completed his master’s and doctoral degrees at the Catalan Institute of Chemical Research (ICIQ) in Tarragona. Upon obtaining his doctoral degree in 2018, he became a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech in California (USA). Pablo returned to Granada in 2022 to continue his career as a Marie Curie Research Fellow and later as a Ramón y Cajal researcher in the Department of Inorganic Chemistry. His research line focuses on the development of catalysts capable of harnessing sunlight or electricity to convert renewable energies into chemical products. He has received several honours, including the 2023 Young Researchers Award from the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry (RSEQ) and a Leonardo Grant from the BBVA Foundation.
Pablo Garrido Barros
The researcher and his team will begin to design and study new catalytic platforms that allow better use of renewable energies such as sunlight for the efficient and selective production of clean fuels and high value-added products through the project ‘More4Less: Metal-Organic Reagents for Light-Enabled Shuttling of protons and electrons’, awarded within the so-called Panel PE5 (Physical Sciences and Engineering – Synthetic Chemistry and Materials). To this end, More4Less places particular emphasis on the ability to control the mechanisms of these reactions, thereby avoiding unstable intermediates that require excessive energy and maximising the efficiency and selectivity of chemical processes. Among these, the sustainable production of ammonia will play a key role due to the environmental and energy impacts of current industrial processes. “My ambition is to be able to provide new chemical strategies for the efficient conversion of solar energy into chemical products and thus make our small contribution to the much needed energy transition,” the researcher explains.
Javier Ortiz Tudela is a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the UGR’s Mind, Brain and Behaviour Research Centre (CIMCYC). After obtaining his undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of Murcia and his doctoral degree from the UGR, he continued his postdoctoral training between the University of Glasgow (United Kingdom) and Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany). Throughout his career, he has combined his experience in behavioural data analysis and neuroimaging, publishing research on the relationship between memory, perception and attention. He has received numerous awards and recognition, particularly for his interdisciplinary approach and his ability to integrate different methodologies.
Javier Ortiz Tudela
Ortiz Tudela’s project is called ‘Cognitive and Neural Computations of Semantics (CONNECTS)’ and is part of Panel SH4 (Social Sciences and Humanities – The Human Mind and Its Complexity). The project, he explains, aims to discern how the brain uses semantic information — that is, the relationships between the elements of our environment — to optimise our interaction with the world. Decades of research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience have shown that the context in which we perceive an object significantly influences how we process it. For example, our brains do not process a cow in a meadow in the same way as a cow in the middle of a road. This differential processing can have both positive and negative effects on our ability to perceive or remember stimuli. For example, we will react more quickly to the cow in the road, but we will remember it in more detail in the meadow. CONNECTS seeks to reconcile these opposite effects, proposing a new conceptual framework that integrates advanced technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography and artificial neural networks.
CONNECTS will contribute to a deeper understanding of the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie our interaction with the environment, and will provide a comprehensive perspective on how the brain processes information based on its goals. The results of this research will have implications both for fundamental knowledge of the brain and for practical applications in areas such as the design of ergonomic environments and the improvement of attention and memory processes in educational contexts.
For the Rector of the University of Granada, Pedro Mercado, “the awarding of these grants to these two young researchers is, on the one hand, recognition of two scientists who are innovative and disruptive, as the ERC requires, and who have magnificent careers ahead of them. It is also recognition of the research ecosystem that exists at the UGR. It allows the University of Granada to showcase its capacity, its versatility and its spirit for carrying out cutting-edge scientific research. And, as we always say, thanks to all this, it demonstrates our potential to attract European funding”.
The 2024 ERC Starting Grant call for applications received 3,474 project proposals, of which 494 were selected. Of these, 33 went to Spanish universities or research institutes. The selected projects were announced on Thursday 5 September. Iliana Ivanova, the European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, said: “The European Commission is proud to support the curiosity and passion of our early-career talent under our Horizon Europe programme. The new ERC Starting Grants winners aim to deepen our understanding of the world. Their creativity is vital to finding solutions to some of the most pressing societal challenges. In this call, I am happy to see one of the highest shares of female grantees to date, a trend that I hope will continue. Congratulations to all!” For her part, European Research Council President Professor Maria Leptin stated that “empowering researchers early on in their careers is at the heart of the mission of the ERC”.
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Translated version: This text has been translated into English by the Language Services Unit (Vice-Rectorate for Internationalization) of the University of Granada.
