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Highlights

The IMDEA institutes have in a very short time become international flagship centres for certain areas of research. They have done this thanks to the exceptional human capital they are able to draw on, to the benefits of outstanding scientific-technical facilities and to good relationships with the industry and other research centres within and outside Spain.

Evidence of this is: accreditation as centre of excellence Severo Ochoa for IMDEA Nanoscience, obtained in 2017; its magnificent laboratories specialising in Nanomagnetism, Nano-optics, Advanced Microscopy and Surface Physics; and its Nanomanufacturing Centre, which has a white room capable of producing nanomaterials in personalised dimensions and nanostructures.

It should also be noted that two IMDEA institutes, IMDEA Food and IMDEA Software, are part of the European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT), the first pertaining to EIT Food and the second to EIT Digital. EIT is an EU body created for the purpose of building capacity in innovation within EU member states. EIT Digital’s slogan is “working towards a consolidated digital Europe” and EIT Food “guarantees the sustainability of the supply chain, from raw materials to consumer”.

One of the key features of IMDEA Food is GENYAL, its platform of clinical trials in nutrition and health, a high performance genomic tool used to investigate how individual human genomes interact with dietary components and these, in turn, with the genome. GENYAL focuses its activity on two areas: carrying out studies into nutritional intervention to validate the effects of functional dietary elements and nutritional supplements on the population in general and by genotype; and the long term recruitment of volunteers.

IMDEA Energy also has fantastic laboratories which are available to its own researchers as well as those from other research centres and companies. The most advanced of these, from the scientific-technical perspective, are the intelligent energy integration lab, the X-ray Diffraction lab, the electrochemical devices study lab, the photosynthetic microorganisms lab, the plant pyrolysis and HDO lab and the high flow solar simulator.

IMDEA Materials also has magnificent scientific facilities, which have enabled their researchers to develop their studies using technological facilities that few other research centres can offer: more than twenty patents and software registrations have been requested. Among the latest relate to tools for simulating behaviour of materials with names as strange as CAPSUL, VIPER and MULTIFOAM. The patents relate to production of new materials which enable energy storage optimisation as well as uniting proteins and polymers for their use in energy and medical applications.

The Spanish State Research Agency has recognized the good work of IMDEA Energy  and IMDEA Materials by awarding them the María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence accreditation.

The objective of IMDEA Water is to improve the integrated management of water in order to ensure its supply and quality. To this end it has four pilot plants (membranes, bio-filters, mesocosms and microbial electrochemistry) and five laboratories based around its four main fields of research that the Institute has converted into flagship research facilities: sustainable management, quality and contamination, treatment and re-use and financial and institutional analysis.

IMDEA Networks is at the Forefront of work in basic science and technology, creating designs today for the networks of tomorrow. Some key words which define this work and which demonstrate IMDEA Networks’ stake in helping build a better future are: 5G, Big Data, block chains and  distributed registers, cloud computing, content distribution networks, data analysis, energy efficient networks, computing in the cloud and on the border, internal positioning, the Internet of Things, machine learning, millimetre wave networks, mobile computing, network economy, measuring the network, web security, web protocols and algorithms, virtualisation of the network (software defined networks – SDN and network function virtualisation – NFV), privacy, social networks, submarine networks, vehicular networks, wireless networks and more…