Researcher Daniel Prades receives a Proof of Concept project by the European Research Council
The European Research Council (ERC) has given Professor Daniel Prades, from the Department of Engineering: Electronics Area of the Faculty of Physics, one of the forty-four projects of the 2016 call for the program Proof of Concept. The researcher from IDIBELL and lecturer of genetics at the University of Barcelona Manel Esteller has also been given one of these projects.
The European Research Council (ERC) has given Professor Daniel Prades, from the Department of Engineering: Electronics Area of the Faculty of Physics, one of the forty-four projects of the 2016 call for the program Proof of Concept. The researcher from IDIBELL and lecturer of genetics at the University of Barcelona Manel Esteller has also been given one of these projects.
The Proof of Concept (PoC) grants are given to researchers in order to carry out commercial applications for their researches, something which means an important step towards knowledge transfer in the productive area. The projects have to show the innovative and commercial potential of the research ideas that have been previously distinguished by the ERC. Prades was awarded in 2013 with a Stating Grant for his project Better Sense: Nanodevice Engineering for a Better Chemical Gas Sensing Technology. He aimed to complete the transfer process from the laboratory to the market.
The project with which Prades obtained the grant PoC -GasApp: Making Complex Analytics Friendly and Available ASAP- is an app for devices that allows detecting gases easily. To put this measure into practice, the user has to put a small single card in the gas and after some time, take a photo with the mobile phone camera. Through colorimetric techniques, the app can identify the presence of chemical substances, which would be marked with a color code.
The most innovative part of the proposal is the possibility of detecting multiple substances in an only way. Therefore, it offers -at a low cost- uses that were only given in big laboratory teams. It will be possible to apply this technology in the areas of safety, environment, and biomedicine. The techniques that make this possible are one of the main results of the BetterSense project, which gave Prades a Starting Grant.
Unlike ERC frontier research projects -given only depending on the scientific excellence of the proposal instead of the research practical application-, PoC projects show a market-oriented element. Bosch i Gimpera Foundation participated in the commercial strategy proposal and will be present in the promotion of the project results to get the transfer to the industry.
Daniel PRades (Barcelona, 1982) graduated in Physics, Electronic Engineering, and holds a master degree in Nanosciences and Nanotechnology at the University of Barcelona and a doctorate in Nanoscience. He worked as a researcher at the Catalonia Institute for Energy Research and is now tenure-track 2 lecturer Serra Húnter at the Department of Engineering: Electronics Area of the Faculty of Physics of the University of Barcelona. In 2008 he created the spin-off for Electronic Nanosystems, which was awarded with the Solvay Prize. He has been in some entities in Germany, Austria and Italy. He is featured as being inventor in seven patents, co-author of around a hundred publications, in scientific journals and books, and more than 180 contributions in conferences. He tutored around thirty tesis, dissertation and secondary school research projects.