Voltar
UMinho Awarded ERA Chair to boost modern reaction engineering
Friday, 9/13/2024
Campus de Gualtar, Braga
The ERA Chair project REACTORS_5.0,
coordinated by António Vicente, Vice-President of the School of Engineering at
the University of Minho (UMinho), researcher at the Centre of Biological
Engineering (CEB), and full professor in the Department of Biological
Engineering, has been awarded €2.5 million from the Horizon Europe Programme
for the next five years.
The ERA Chair funding mechanism supports
universities and research centres in attracting and retaining highly qualified
human resources, establishing new research teams, and promoting excellence in
research.
The REACTORS_5.0 aims to create a
world-class excellence grant in the research and development of new reactor and
microreactor technologies based solely on the principles of reaction
engineering. Thus, it facilitates green and digital innovations in alignment
with the principles of Industry 5.0, as well as the specific outcomes and
impacts of Horizon Europe’s Pillars I-III work programmes and the UN’s
Sustainable Development Goals.
The project seeks to enhance UMinho’s
capacity in modern reaction engineering by establishing a local
interdisciplinary research and industrial partnership to disseminate the first
principles and develop sustainable reactor and microreactor technologies. This
partnership will link researchers from the fields of bioengineering, biomedical
engineering, and advanced materials.
The ERA Chair holder shall be Nuno Reis
from the University of Bath. A UMinho alumnus, Nuno Reis has spent the last 19
years in the United Kingdom, working at the forefront of research and
innovation in reactor engineering, in the Chemical Engineering departments at
the universities of Cambridge, Loughborough, and Bath, successively, where he
is currently an Associate Professor and Executive Editor of the renowned
“Chemical Engineering Journal”.
Overall, the REACTORS_5.0 represents a
significant step towards establishing UMinho, and particularly the CEB, as a
European and global reference, over the next decade, in the development of
innovative, resilient, and efficient chemical and biological processes for
food, health, and the environment, by combining reactor technologies and
engineering with unique knowledge and expertise in biomolecular and cellular
engineering, thus offering transformative green and digital innovations with a
global impact based on the "molecular-cellular-to-reactor" nexus.
In this call, 38 ERA Chairs were approved
across Europe, eight for Portugal and one led by UMinho.
