Politecnico di Milano has received five new grants from the ERC, the European Research Council.

Camilla Colombo, with the project GREEN SPECIES, has been awarded a Consolidator Grant, one of the grants intended for researchers with at least seven years of postdoctoral experience and a promising scientific curriculum. These are researchers who wish to consolidate their research independence. The funding is up to €2 million per individual project for a maximum duration of five years. The project was selected from over 2200 proposals received by the ERC. This is a great achievement for our university, considering that only 14.4% of the projects submitted received funding this year.

Space debris is growing exponentially and immediate action is needed to reduce the risk of collision and to enable sustainable use of space as a common good in the future. GREEN SPECIES will develop an interdisciplinary approach to modelling space debris and predicting its evolution. A probabilistic model will be developed, taking into account all physical, economic and political variables. The management of the debris environment will be performed by a robust controller, described as a complex dynamic system. Ideal feedback control measures will be translated into policies and guidelines, assessing both the environmental impact and the social and economic benefits of space missions through the achievement of sustainable development goals.

GREEN SPECIES will also propose a new economic model for a sustainable space credit system. The project will enable the creation of the Space Sustainability Lab for advanced modelling and monitoring of the debris environment using high performance computing and virtual reality.

Four other Politecnico researchers have received funding for an ERC Proof of Concept, which aims to enable previously ERC-funded ideas to move from frontier to applied research.

The team, coordinated by Carlo Spartaco Casari, intends to develop a new printable anti-counterfeiting system (PYPAINT) based on carbon-based nanostructures with a specific optoelectronic response that allows the creation of a unique artwork identification code invisible to the human eye. The project stems from research carried out at the Department of Energy’s NanoLab as part of the EspLORE project, in collaboration with the start-up studio DayOne. With PYPAINT, the research group aims to contribute to ensuring the extreme value of works of art in Europe and worldwide.

Matteo Maestri’s CATALYSE project proposes to develop software for multi-scale modelling of industrial catalytic processes, combining a rigorous first principles approach with advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. The software will provide a plug-and-play framework for incorporating detailed atomistic kinetics into advanced chemical reactor models, as a key tool to support the development of new technologies for energy transition and sustainable resource use.

Francesco Topputo’s GUIDO project will lay the foundations for the realisation of an autonomous guidance unit for satellites in space. Guiding a satellite means planning and controlling its trajectory and deciding on the orientation of its thrusters during manoeuvres. The innovative element of GUIDO is its ability to find trajectories using reliable optimisation algorithms running on a low power electronic board. The development of the GUIDO PoC will take place in the DART Lab, where guidance and navigation algorithms for spacecraft are tested through simulations with integrated hardware.

Despite their surprising clinical success in adults, there are still no mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)-based products approved for paediatric use to prevent the progression of childhood interstitial lung disease (ChILD). The aim of Manuela Raimondi’s NICHILD project is to standardise and automate the production of the MSC secretome and to validate it for translation into paediatric use for the treatment of ChILD.

This brings the total number of ERC grants received by Politecnico di Milano to 60, of which 14 are Consolidator Grants. In Horizon Europe, the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation 2021-2027, Politecnico has so far achieved the extraordinary result of winning 126 projects, including 17 ERCs, worth more than 64 million euros. Currently,  Politecnico’s success rate is 20.45%, compared to around 15% at European level. In the European Union, Politecnico is the fifth university in terms of the number of projects funded.