The Innova award acknowledges the best work carried out in public-private collaboration that has generated results in the last three years in any area related to Sustainable Chemistry. According to the jury’s decision, Natalia Muñoz has been awarded “for her promising results in the project Development of a new class of sustainable P(V) reagents that lead to greater efficiency and more ecological processes, developed at the Scripps Research Institute, in collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb”.

Natalia Muñoz’s research to achieve sustainable and scalable reagents has also been acknowledged by the Robert Robinson Award from the Organic Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry in the United Kingdom, as well as by the Green Chemistry Challenge Award from the Environmental Protection Agency. US (EPA).

Natalia Muñoz Padial (Granada, 1983) is currently the holder of a Junior Leader scholarship from La Caixa and develops her work in the Functional Inorganic Materials (Funimat) research group led by Carlos Martí-Gastaldo at the ICMol of the University of Valencia, a centre acknowledged as a María de Maeztu unit of excellence from the Ministry of Science and Innovation.

She previously received scholarships from highly competitive scientific programs such as the Marie Skłodowska-Curie of the European Commission or the Juan de la Cierva of the Ministry of Science and Innovation, both in their training modality and in the category of incorporation. Her concern to obtain useful scientific results for the industry has led her to work with other companies, such as the multinational Sensient Fragrances S.A. or the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer Inc. and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

UV runner-up in the Research category

On the other hand, a scientific publication by another researcher from the University of Valencia, Ramón Torres Cavanillas, PhD in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at the Molecular Science Institute, has been declared a finalist for these same awards in the Research category. The work “Spin-crossover nanoparticles anchored on MoS2 layers for heterostructures with tunable strain driven by thermal or light-induced spin switching” has been developed at the Institute of Molecular Science of the University of Valencia.