Amparo Ruiz Carretero is coming back to Spain and joining the ICMM thanks to the ATRAE program

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The Spanish researcher Amparo Ruiz Carretero, now a permanent researcher at the CNRS (France), is coming back to Spain and joining the Materials Science Institute of Madrid (ICMM-CSIC) thanks to the ATRAE program, grant by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities in Spain.

The Spanish Research Agency, part of this Ministry, published this week the resolution for the 2024 call of the ATRAE Program. This program grants 30 million euros to recruit 31 world-leading scientists in their fields. Thanks to this, Ruiz Carretero will be able to rejoin the Spanish scientific system with a four-year contract, which also includes the hiring of two postdoctoral researchers and the establishment of a new laboratory at ICMM-CSIC, where she has been a visiting researcher for a few months.

Ruiz Carretero is an organic chemist and will work at ICMM on the creation of organic solar cells using a class of compounds called 'chiral': "They are mirror images that cannot overlap because they have no plane of symmetry, like a helix; it's the same as with DNA," explains the researcher.

She is already collaborating with groups at ICMM such as the Supramolecular and Multifunctional Materials group (especially  Berta Gómez-Lor) and the 2D Foundry group (Carmen Munuera). The researcher proposes this new strategy to conduct charges in solar panels and thus achieve sustainable energy on a higher level.

"We are going to work on the so-called 'CISS effect,' which has never been applied to organic photovoltaics," the researcher explains. "The advantage of using organic materials is their flexibility, as we can apply them to all kinds of substrates," she says, and continues: "As chemists, we can design them as we want and give them the functionalities we need." Ruiz Carretero argues that organic molecules have vast potential, but acknowledges that they have not yet reached the energy production level of silicon, for example.

However, her work looks to the medium and long term: "If we look at energy demand forecasts for the next 30 years, we won’t have the capacity to meet that demand. That’s why we are looking for an alternative material, a material we will reach through miniaturization techniques and sustainable chemistry methods," concludes the researcher.