Advanced Grants are the most important grants given by the European Research Council to support projects led by senior researchers. They last 5 years and they can be given in any area of knowledge.

Eugenio Coronado will invest the grant in designing intelligent materials made up by magnetic molecules. These molecules are placed on bi-dimensional materials, which are similar to graphene and have magnetic and superconductive attributes. The main objective is to create a new generation of materials and hybrid devices that can be directly applied to Electronics, Spintronics, molecular detection and energy storage.

It is the second time that this professor of Inorganic Chemistry and researcher of the Institute for Molecular Science (ICMol) at the Science Park of the Universitat de València obtains an Advanced Grant. This is unprecedented at the Universitat de València and a very unusual fact within Spanish R&D. Only 15 researchers from Spanish centres have conducted two ERC projects. It is the first time it happens in the Valencian Community. In 2009, Coronado obtained his first ERC Advanced Grant assigned to a Valencian centre. He has also obtained a Proof of Concept Grant of ERC since then. He manages the ICMol. This institute counts with six ERC grants of different modalities.

Mónica Bolufer is a professor of Modern History at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of the Universitat de València and a researcher of the Institut Universitari d’Estudis de la Dona. She is a specialist in social, cultural and gender history. She will invest her grant in studying gender models during the 18th century in Europe and its colonial territories. She will give a transnational and transatlantic approach to the expansion of these models. She will overcome national and merely comparative approaches and will place the Enlightenment of the Spanish Empire in the historiographic map. The professor Isabel Burdiel participates in the project. The project analyses the transference of ideas in the fields of translation, sociability, travelling, reading and culture of sensibility. It is undertaken from an approach that highlights the subjects’ capacity of action and the complex legacy of Enlightenment in our days.

This is the first time that a researcher of the Universitat de València obtains an ERC Advanced Grant. It is the first grant of this type that is given in the Valencian Community within the field of Social Sciences and Humanities.

The Advanced Grant programme of the European Research Council has been working for 10 years to support innovative high-quality projects. The European Research Council was established in 2008. It has financed 118 initiatives led by researchers working in Spanish centres (9 of them are Valencian) so far. The tenth call (2017) has been the most productive for science in Spain and the Universitat de València. Our university has obtained 2 out of 18 Advanced Grants given to Spanish centres and universities.

ERC grants allow excellent researchers to undertake their best ideas and create work positions as the team of the benefited researchers hire new personnel.

Eugenio Coronado

Coronado leads a research group at ICMol (an institute that he manages since 2000). It focuses in designing and synthesising new molecular materials with magnetic, electrical and optical properties.  During his last years of research, he has focused on designing multifunctional materials and molecular nano-magnets from a molecular approach. The results of this research have been published in about 300 works in international scientific magazines of Chemistry and Material Sciences, and 25 revision works. He is professor of Chemical Sciences by the Universitat de València and professor in Physical Sciences by the Université Louis Pasteur de Strasbourg.

At a national scale, he has been awarded with the Rey Jaime I Award of Research in New Technologies (2003) and the National Award Rey Juan Carlos I for Scientific and Technical Research (1997). At an international scale, he was awarded with the Chair Van Arkel by the University of Leiden (2003) and was named fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry of England (2004).

Mónica Bolufer

She is a tenured professor of the Department of Modern and Contemporary History. She researches sociocultural history and the history of women during the modern era, particularly during the 18th century. She is interested in researching the differences of genders in the culture of Enlightenment, the feminine writing and reading practice, the history of the family, the idea of privacy, the public sphere and the moral regulation of tradition (politeness and the social hygiene movement) within the context of the modernisation of the Spanish society and the cultural relationships between Spain and Europe in the light century. She has published several books and numerous national and international articles.

She has researched in other Spanish and foreign centres such as l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris, l’Université de Franche Comté, the Royal Holloway College-University of London, the European University Institute and the University of Cambridge. 

She has participated in different national and international research projects, including Feminism and the Enlightenment (1650-1850) and Acción COST Women Writers in History (ISO901). Currently, she leads the project Construcciones del yo. Narraciones y representaciones del sujeto moderno, entre lo personal y lo colectivo (ss. XVII-XIX) and co-leads the European Network on Theory and Practice of Biography. 

She is Vice-President of the Spanish Foundation of Modern History and was a member of the Management Board of the Spanish Association of Research on History of Women.