catalan institute of nanotechnology

The Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) has set up its new headquarters at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) campus. The new faculties are located in a 6,000 square meter building with 40 laboratories, where scientific projects will be developed in different areas, from biomedicine to the development of everyday products such as paint or detergents.. This project is funded by both the Catalan and Spanish Governments and aims to make the centre a flagship in the European scientific field.

Through its FET-Flagship programme, the European Commission is allocating €1 billion to each of the two main research projects in Europe. The first one is a project to explore the properties of graphene, a new material deriving from graphite that might revolutionise industry as silicon did a few decades ago. The second one will simulate a human brain in order to understand how it exactly works. The Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology is one of the nine leading institutes coordinating the graphene project, in which 623 research groups from 32 different countries will participate. Furthermore, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center will take care of the calculations at a molecular level in the Human Brain Project.