Dr. Carla Casadevall (URV-ICIQ) has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, with funding of approximately €1.5 million over up to five years, to lead the project BIOPOLE.
I am honoured to receive this ERC Starting Grant to develop BIOPOLE. Our aim is to design bio-inspired photocatalytic polymersome-based systems that can mimic natural confinement and organization for solar-driven energy conversion. This support will allow me to acquire all the needed equipment and infrastructure that my group requires and establish a strong multidisciplinary research team to explore new pathways towards sustainable energy technologies.
The BIOPOLE project
The transition to renewable fuels and chemicals requires efficient CO2 reduction technologies. Artificial photosynthesis (AP) offers a promising strategy but remains limited by low efficiency, poor selectivity beyond 2-electron products, and cross-reactivity in solution. BIOPOLE proposes a bioinspired solution by mimicking the compartmentalization of thylakoid membranes. Using functionalized polymeric vesicles (polymersomes) as photocatalytic microreactors, BIOPOLE will spatially separate oxidation and reduction reactions, enhance charge separation, and enable efficient electron transfer from water oxidation to CO2 reduction. This approach aims to develop stable and selective photocatalytic polymersomes, advancing both the conceptual design of AP systems and the production of solar fuels and chemicals through a transformative, membrane-based platform.
About Dr Carla Casadevall
Dr Carla Casadevall is a Ramón y Cajal Assistant Professor at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) and Junior Group Leader at ICIQ. She studied Chemistry at the University of Girona (BSc 2013, MSc 2014) and obtained her PhD at ICIQ (2019) at Prof Julio Lloret-Fillol group, working on molecular systems for water oxidation and photoredox catalysis. Afterward, she carried out postdoctoral research at the groups of Prof. Erwin Reisner at the University of Cambridge as a BBSRC and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, focusing on bio-hybrid systems and carbon-based materials for solar fuels and chemicals.
Since October 2022 she has established her independent research group at ICIQ and the URV with a “La Caixa” Junior Leader Fellowship and a Ramón y Cajal contract, respectively. Her group research centres on catalyst-functionalised polymeric microreactors for artificial photosynthesis and sustainable catalysis. She has authored over 40 publications, holds two patents (one transferred to the spin-off Treellum Technologies), and has received several recognition such as the RSEQ Young Investigator Prize (2023), the Catalan Chemical Society Emerging Scientific Talent Prize (2023), the Thieme Chemistry Journals Award (2024) and a BBVA Foundation Leonardo Grant (2025), among others. She is the President of the Young Section of the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry (JIQ-RSEQ), the Networks Team Leader and Board Member of the European Young Chemists Network (EYCN) of EuChems, and has been recently elected member of the Early Career Advisory Board of JACS Au.
About ERC Starting Grants
The ERC Starting Grants are highly competitive awards intended to support early-career researchers establishing their own independent research teams. In the latest call, the ERC funded 478 proposals across Europe with a total budget of €761 million, following a selection rate of just over 12 % from nearly 3,928 applications. Each grant provides up to €1.5 million over five years, with further top-ups available for relocation, equipment, large-scale facilities, or field-work costs. ERC estimates around 3,000 new jobs will be created by this round. Grantees include researchers from 25 countries, with nationalities spanning 51 countries; Spain and the UK each had 32 awardees, Germany 99, the Netherlands 44 and France 41. Approximately 42 % of grantees were women, similar to previous years at 43–44 %.
The ERC, founded in 2007 under the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, is the premier European funding body for frontier scientific research. It funds researchers of any age/nationality via four main schemes (Starting, Consolidator, Advanced, and Synergy Grants), plus a Proof-of-Concept scheme to foster early commercial translation. It is steered by the independent ERC Scientific Council and currently presided by Maria Leptin. The overall ERC budget (2021–2027) exceeds €16 billion.
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