Basque Center for Macromolecular Design and Engineering POLYMAT Fundazioa

This fellowship must be completed not later than November 2024

Basque Center for Macromolecular Design and Engineering POLYMAT Fundazioa is a research center of international excellence located in Donostia-San Sebastián linked to the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU. It is a multidisciplinary research center which includes a wide variety of research teams working in the fields of polymer synthesis, polymerization reaction engineering, membranes, polymers for electronics, energy storage, biomedical applications, rheology and polymer processing. The main objective is to contribute to societal challenges of the 21st century such as energy, sustainability and health. Specifically, it works on the development of polymers to respond to these challenges.

Research proposals

POLYMAT is a multidisciplinary research center with different research lines that include:

• Polymer synthesis. Research groups in this area cover different activities such as organic catalysis, polymer hybrids and robust, efficient and orthogonal synthesis of polymers. They study the most distinctive characteristics of the polymers: the chemical composition distribution (functionality) and the architecture of the polymer chain.
• Assembly and processing. Assembly has played a key role in the development of the polymer industry. Thus, high impact polystyrene and semicrystalline polyolefins are based on the assembly of in-situ produced graft copolymers and that of polymer chains by dispersed forces, respectively. Nature shows that more complex interactions (dispersive, polar and charged) can be used to produce hierarchical structures. Biological systems serve as example to extract the basic principles and then develop other materials with functionalities that cannot be achieved otherwise and that are not attainable by the current polymers.
• Theory and simulations. Theory and simulations are used to provide understanding of the observed phenomena and to guide the activities in polymer synthesis and assembly. Simulations of polymeric materials and their properties expands over three scale domains, according to the system size to be modeled and to the time scale of the phenomena sought.
• Energy. Generation of energy from renewable and CO2-neutral sources is one the greatest 21th Century’s challenges. The groups involve in this area work in polymer photovoltaics cells and organic batteries
• Waterborne dispersed polymers. The current research topics include Knowledge-based processes for high-performance dispersed polymers, structured nanoparticles and bio and smart materials
• Tuneable and stimuli responsive membranes. Within this research area, activities are focused on membranes for gas and vapor separations, stimuli-responsive/biomimicking membranes and membranes in water treatment processes.
• Polymers for biomedical applications. This line is focusing on the development of biocompatible and biodegradable polymers from natural resources able to replace synthetic polymers based on non-renewable monomers for biomedical applications such as tissue regeneration, polymer drugs, bio—absorbable materials for vascular stents, polymer carriers for drug and gene delivery, etc. In addition, this research area also studies the multifunctional polymer-drug conjugates, self-assembling amphiphiles for the controlled delivery of bioactives, new diagnostic technologies as theranostic approaches, and environment-responsive nanogels.
• Polymer physics. This research line is devoted to understanding structure, morphology, functionality and properties of semi-crystalline multiphasic polymers: Effects of confinement on polymer nucleation, crystallization and morphology, How polymer topology affects crystallization, Melt memory effects on the crystallization of homopolymers and copolymers, etc.