Zaragoza (EFE).- The Institute of Nanoscience and Materials of Aragon (INMA) hopes to obtain accreditation as a Severo Ochoa Center of Excellence, a seal that will mean financing of more than one million euros a year and hire some 40 researchers who today they have no place in their facilities. To do this, it needs land on the Río Ebro Campus for a new building and the president of Aragón, Javier Lambán, has promised this Monday to transfer the land.
This new building, Lambán has assured during a visit to the INMA, will be essential for the generation and attraction of talent to the Community, for which reason he has transmitted to those responsible the willingness of the Government of Aragon to cede the necessary land and in the most as quickly as possible, given that the institute’s activity is spread over five buildings on the Río Ebro Campus of the University of Zaragoza and this, the president has admitted, “greatly reduces its logistical capacity and capacity to work at full capacity”.
The institute hopes to achieve, in its third attempt, the cataloging as a Severo Ochoa Center of Excellence in the call that closes on April 29 -and which is granted by the Ministry of Science and Innovation for four years-, as highlighted by its director, Conrado Rillo.
Lambán has visited the facilities on the Río Ebro Campus to convey the support of the Government of Aragon and the intention to transfer the site, which would not entail complex procedures.
A staff of 300 people
INMA is a joint institute of the Center for Scientific Research and the University of Zaragoza focused on research, training, transfer and dissemination activities in the field of nanoscience and materials science and technology that currently has a staff close to 300 people, approximately half permanent researchers.
Rillo has insisted on the importance of Severo Ochoa excellence, given that it will mean obtaining funding of just over one million a year to hire scientific-technical and management personnel and encourage collaboration between different research groups with the aim of growing and be more visible internationally and project Aragon abroad.
In addition to laying out the site, the construction of the new building will take between 4 and 6 years, so the most immediate solution for spaces offered by the University of Zaragoza to INMA is to have a quickly built building on the Río Ebro Campus that It could be in two years to welcome the researchers that are recruited, especially if the seal of excellence is obtained, since it will involve around 40 people and today “they would not have a place here without a solution of this type” , explained the director of the center.
The missing icing
“We hope this year that we have already put that icing on the cake that we lack” to obtain accreditation, stressed the director of INMA, who has highlighted the work to go up “steps”. “We are with one foot inside”, he assured, since the necessary qualification is 95 and the INMA exceeds it in one of the two sections and in the other, it is “a little behind”, for which he estimates that “it is not almost nothing is missing.”
Thus, he has highlighted the necessary institutional support that the Government of Aragon is willing to give and an “emblematic, modern” building, which has the best laboratories and is “very attractive” for very high-level researchers who want to develop in him his lines of research.
The objective of INMA, Rillo pointed out, is to reinforce lines of research in fields such as artificial intelligence applied to the design of materials, and for this purpose a researcher from the University of Vienna will be incorporated, possibly after the summer, or in the area of energy, specifically in the transformation of CO2 into useful products, and for this an Aragonese professor will return from the Sorbonne.