Distinguished EU grant to promising Chalmers researchers

The researchers receiving ERC Starting Grant 2025, from the back to the front: Mathilde Luneau, Yizhou Yang, Rocío Mercado

Three researchers from Chalmers receive the European Research Council’s ERC Starting Grant 2025: Yizhou Yang and Mathilde Luneau at The Department of Chemistry and Chemical engineering, Rocío Mercado at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The grant is given to promising researchers at the beginning of their careers and aims to help them pursue their own projects and ideas, as well as shape their research groups.

Yizhou Yang

Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering receives 1,5 million euro for the project Covalent Organic Framework Membrane Reactors for Full – Volume Active Electrodes in CO2 Electrolysis.

Yizhou Yang and his teams project is focused on green transition technology for CO₂ (carbon dioxide). Simply explained the project will help to convert greenhouse gas CO₂ into valuable fuels and other chemical feedstocks using renewable energy sources such as solar or wind power.

“ERC Starting Grant is a significant milestone in my academic career. It means a lot to me. To get this recognition of my potential to become a research leader in Europe in the future and the value of my research direction, with the expectation that it will lead to groundbreaking change in the field of research by the European Research Council during the selection process is a great encouragement to me personally and my research team.

“The grant will provide substantial financial support, enabling me to strengthen my team and focus more on science. I anticipate the fast advancing of this research in my group. Exciting results and new knowledge are expected. These new findings will facilitate the development of focused technology and build our international academic influence.”

Mathilde Luneau

Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering receives 1,5 million euro for the project ReGenCAT.

ReGenCAT will extend the lifetime of catalysts which will minimize the demand for critical raw materials necessary to carry out sustainable chemical reactions. Within the research project, Mathilde Luneau and her team will develop a novel type of reactor bridging electro- and thermocatalysis in an innovative way.

“I am very honored to receive this grant and grateful for the support of the ERC at this stage of my career. In terms of research, the support from the ERC will take my research to a totally new and unexplored direction, which is very exciting. It also means that I will be able to build a strong team that will be dedicated to this new research idea, says Mathilde Luneau.”

Rocío Mercado

Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, receives 1,5 million euro for the project "POLYGEN: New Paradigms for Deep Generative Modeling of Polymers"

Polymers are everywhere - from the plastics in packaging and medical devices to the advanced materials used in electronics. They are long chains of repeating molecular building blocks, and their versatility makes them central to modern life. Yet this very complexity - with different structures, sensitivities, and combinations - has made polymers difficult to design using traditional trial-and-error methods.

With her ERC Starting Grant, Rocío Mercado and her team will bring the power of generative AI into this field. Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that can create new content - such as images, text, or molecular structures - based on patterns learned from large amounts of data. Instead of only analyzing what already exists, these models can suggest new and original possibilities.

“Receiving the ERC Starting Grant is both a recognition of my team’s early contributions to AI for molecular engineering and an opportunity to push into a new frontier: generative AI for polymers,” says Rocío Mercado. “On a personal level, this award gives me the chance to grow an even stronger interdisciplinary group and pursue a vision I’ve long been passionate about.”