Letter from the Director

Dear friends,

Thank you for your interest in the 2019 ICIQ Scientific Report. I hope you find the information useful.

Here you will find comprehensive information about ICIQ’s achievements and challenges in 2019. For hardly understandable reasons, once again, we suffered an important decrease in funding from Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad. This forced us to devote much effort to secure the economical viability of the Institute. We hope this situation will be reverted in 2020.

At the same time, 2019 brought much good news, including our success in securing European funding. Specifically, Prof. Antonio M. Echavarren obtained an ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grant, and Dr. Marcos G. Suero received an ERC Consolidator Grant. The overall funding coming from European projects represented 89%, or about €7.1 million, of the total funding from competitive sources.

As for our research outputs, the institute continued being very active, publishing 147 high-quality scientific papers during the year (80% in the first quartile journals) with an average impact factor of 9,8. The institute topped international rankings measuring scientific excellence like excellencemapping.net and http://www.natureindex.com. Once again, ICIQ has been the major individual contributor to Nature Index in Spain in 2019. We hope this long-lasting situation will translate into additional institutional support from our scientific authorities!

I am convinced that we must share our passion for research with the general public, especially with the youngest ones. The celebration of the 2019 International Year of the Periodic Table has been a good opportunity to talk about chemistry and to show how the chemical elements shape our world. As ICIQ researchers, we don’t cease in putting all our efforts in doing research to contribute for a more sustainable world.

We continue to turning ICIQ into a true talent platform. We‘re setting the ground to increase and consolidate our collaboration with industry partners and to implement the RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation) principles in all ICIQ’s activities.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Miquel A. Pericàs