image: Image credit: Xosé Durán | The Branco Weiss Fellowship
Credit: Image credit: Xosé Durán | The Branco Weiss Fellowship
CiQUS researcher Luis M. Mateo has been awarded a Branco Weiss Fellowship, one of the most selective international fellowships supporting early-career scientists pursuing unconventional and potentially transformative research ideas.
The five-year fellowship will allow Mateo to develop his project independently at the Centre for Research in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Materials (CiQUS) at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, where he is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the groups of Diego Peña and Dolores Pérez. Based at ETH Zurich, the Branco Weiss Fellowship supports postdoctoral researchers from any discipline in pursuing original research ideas at the academic institution of their choice. No more than ten new fellows are selected each year.
With up to CHF 600,000 (approximately €635,000) over five years, the fellowship will give Mateo an unusual degree of independence at this stage of his career, enabling him to begin building his own research team and establish an independent research programme at USC. He becomes the second Spanish researcher to receive the fellowship and one of the first to develop the award in Spain.
“This fellowship offers an exceptional opportunity to explore a high-risk idea with the freedom and time needed to develop it,” says Mateo. “Being able to carry out the project at CiQUS, in an environment that brings together synthetic chemistry, nanoscience and molecular materials, will allow us to address questions that would be difficult to tackle from a single discipline.”
Turning molecular stability into a design opportunity
Mateo's project, PhthalocyanYnes, focuses on phthalocyanines: exceptionally stable molecules whose optical properties have made them widely used as pigments and highly attractive building blocks for functional materials. Their stability, however, also makes them remarkably difficult to modify once they have been synthesised.
The project proposes a radically different strategy: introducing an aryne, an extremely reactive molecular intermediate that exists for only a fraction of a second, into these highly stable molecular systems. The challenge is to capture this fleeting reactivity and use it to selectively transform the phthalocyanine structure, for example through cycloaddition reactions.
If successful, the approach could provide a new way of accessing families of phthalocyanine-based structures without having to design and synthesise each molecule from scratch. Instead, a common advanced precursor could be modified at a late stage of synthesis, making these molecules substantially more versatile and programmable.
The project will combine synthetic chemistry, advanced spectroscopy, computational modelling and single-molecule characterisation to explore molecular architectures that are currently difficult to access, including asymmetric phthalocyanine–carbon nanostructure hybrids, extended molecular networks and nanographenes with tunable optical, electronic and magnetic properties.
The resulting chemistry could open new opportunities for the development of functional molecular materials for applications in optoelectronics and quantum technologies.
Building an independent research programme at CiQUS
Mateo joined CiQUS in 2021 as a postdoctoral researcher within the ERC Synergy Grant MolDAM project, supervised by Diego Peña. He has since continued his research at the centre, developing expertise at the intersection of organic chemistry, molecular design, nanoscience, molecular materials and surface chemistry.
The Branco Weiss Fellowship will enable him to establish his own research programme at CiQUS, strengthening the centre's ability to attract and support emerging scientific talent and to pursue high-risk research with transformative potential.
CiQUS holds the María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence accreditation and the CIGUS recognition awarded by the Xunta de Galicia. The centre also receives financial support from the European Union through the Galicia FEDER 2021–2027 Programme.