First general assembly of EIC Pathfinder project ICONIC
The ICONIC team celebrated their first Consortium General Assembly, discussing the progress and planning for future directions.
May 21, 2024
Last week, the ICONIC team celebrated their first Consortium General Assembly at ICFO. Partners travelled to Castelldefels, Barcelona, on Thursday afternoon for a social dinner near the beach, marking their first in-person gathering.
The following morning, ICONIC’s coordinator and Prof. at ICFO Pelayo García de Arquer welcomed everyone to the meeting, highlighting the progress made in the project’s initial months. He suggested short-term actions and emphasized the importance of collaborations to plan potential scientific publications.
Each work package leader then presented an outline of completed actions and future steps. ICONIC and ICFO project manager Judith Salvador summarized the status and progress of deliverables and tasks. Guillermo Gerling, KTT manager, and Marta Martin, Science Communication Officer at ICFO, discussed the planned communication and exploitation actions and explained the Portfolio activities.
After a coffee break, the technical work packages continued. Max Garcia Melchor, Associate professor at the Trinity College Dublin detailed his group’s work on modelling and testing candidates for C-N coupling, presenting their reactivity and coverage study results. Next, Prof. Elena Gubanova from the Technical University of Munich, provided an overview of catalyst synthesis and characterization work, followed by PhD student Johannes Sterzinger who presented a sensor developed to rapidly and accurately detect urea. Postdoctoral researcher at ICFO Viktoria Golovanova discussed experiments studying individual materials and the roles of copper and zinc.
In the afternoon, the team took a guided tour of the CO2 Mitigation Accelerated by Photons lab in ICFO’s west building. Prof. Ruud Van Omen from TU Delft concluded the meeting by outlining plans for a proof-of-concept using real seawater streams, and postdoctoral researcher Shilong Fu detailed the experiments done to study the co-reduction of carbon dioxide and nitrate for the urea synthesis.