Scientific staff at BCMaterials are developing next-generation nanomaterials combined with naturally sourced polymer membranes for water decontamination and reuse. These advanced materials not only remove emerging contaminants—such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria—and heavy metals, including arsenic, but also enable the recovery of high-value critical elements for industry, such as rare earth elements, cobalt, and lithium.

The new year has brought BCMaterials the arrival of three new young scientists to our staff. They are the pre-doctoral researchers Karen Cano and Mikel Russo, along with the post-doctoral researcher Jules Marcone. They will contribute from different scientific backgrounds to materials science development for areas like active and smart materials, nanostructured materials and computational materials science.

Karen Cano

We would like to congratulate María Calles García for obtaining her PhDs in Materials Science and Technology from the UPV/EHU.

On December 4 made a brilliant defense of her thesis titled ‘Chelating Metal-Organic Frameworks and Their Polymer-Composites For Water Remediation’. The thesis was directed by Viktor Petrenko and Roberto Fernández de Luis.

Researchers at the CIC biomaGUNE, BCMaterials and CIC energiGUNE Basque research centres have managed to modify a class of proteins to give them the ability to transport and store electricity. These proteins can be used to create sustainable, efficient and biocompatible conducting materials. These materials are highly stable and easy to process, which means they can be incorporated into industrial processes.

BCMaterials, in partnership with the Aragon University Institute for Engineering Research (I3A) at the University of Zaragoza, is advancing the MICROBIOSENS project — an initiative focused on developing and applying biosensors to evaluate the malignant potential of tumor cells. The project is funded by the Association of Parents of Children with Cancer of Aragon (Aspanoa).

On October 23 and 24, two predoctoral researchers from BCMaterials successfully defended their PhD theses at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU): Paula Rodríguez Lejarraga and Sara Martín Iglesias. We warmly congratulate both of them for their outstanding work and this important milestone in their research careers.

BCMaterials will develop four new research projects within the ‘Generación del Conocimiento’ (Knowledge Generation) program, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities. The projects will cover very different aspects of new materials research: from proposing new computational simulations for the characterization of magnetoactive and electroactive materials, to innovative chemical synthesis systems for nanomaterials, and the creation of new perovskite solar cells and sustainable catalysts for synthetic fuels.

We are glad to welcome Eric H. Hill as a new Ikerbasque Research Associate Professor at BCMaterials.

We want to give our warmest welcome to Paola Zimmermann Crocomo, Diana Cabrosi and Francisco Peralta, who joined BCMaterials as post-doctoral researchers, under the Basque Government’s IKUR strategy program.

Paola Crocomo

The sustained growth of BCMaterials' research staff is complemented by an increase in the center's support personnel. Specifically, the IT department welcomes a new technical assistant: Mikel Asurmendi del Campo. With training in Computer Systems and Network Administration, as well as Cybersecurity (ranking in the top 27 in Spain on the TryHackMe leaderboard), Mikel joins BCMaterials to assist with maintaining the center's hardware and IT systems.

Welcome to BCMaterials, Mikel!