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EEUM wins 2.5 million euros to boost modern reaction engineering

The ERA Chair REACTORS_5.0 project, coordinated by António Vicente, vice-president and full professor of the School of Engineering at the University of Minho and researcher at the Centre of Biological Engineering (CEB), has been funded with 2.5 million euros from the Horizon Europe Programme for the next five years.

The ERA Chair funding mechanism supports universities and research centres in attracting and retaining highly qualified human resources, creating new research teams and promoting excellent research.

REACTORS_5.0 makes it possible to create a world-class pool of excellence in the research and development of new reactor and microreactor technologies, exclusively based on the principles of reaction engineering, contributing to green and digital innovations in line with the principles of Industry 5.0 and the specific results and impacts of pillars I-III of the Horizon Europe work programmes and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The aim is to build UMinho’s capacity in modern reaction engineering by establishing a local interdisciplinary research and industrial partnership for the dissemination of first principles and the development of sustainable reactor and microreactor technologies, connecting researchers from the fields of bioengineering, biomedical engineering and advanced materials.

The ERA Chair will be held by Nuno Reis, from the University of Bath. A former UMinho student, Nuno Reis has spent the last 19 years in the UK, developing his work at the forefront of research and innovation in reactor engineering, successively in the Chemical Engineering departments of the universities of Cambridge, Loughborough and Bath, where he is currently an associate professor and executive editor of the renowned ‘Chemical Engineering Journal’.

Overall, REACTORS_5.0 represents a giant step forward in the ambition to establish UMinho, and in particular the CEB, as a European/global reference in the development of innovative, resilient and efficient chemical and biological processes for food, health and the environment over the next decade, combining reactor technologies and engineering with unique expertise and capabilities in biomolecular and cellular engineering, offering transformative green and digital innovations with global impact based on the ‘molecular-cellular-reactor’ nexus.

In this call, 38 ERA Chairs were approved at European level, eight of which are in Portugal, with UMinho leading one of them.