MSCA-PF: Joint application at the University of Granada. Department of Chemical Engineering.

Professor Ignacio Moya Ramírez, from the Department of  Chemical Engineering at the University of Granada, welcomes postdoctoral candidates interested in applying for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (MSCA-PF) in 2024 at this University. Please note that applicants must comply with the Mobility Rule (for more information about the 2024 call, please consult this link.

Brief description of the institution:

The University of Granada (UGR), founded in 1531, is one of the largest and most important universities in Spain. With over 56,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students and more than 6,000 members of staff, the UGR offers over 90 undergraduate degrees, 164 master’s degrees (8 of which are international double degrees) and 28 doctoral programmes via its 124 departments and nearly 50 centers. Accordingly, the UGR offers one of the most extensive and diverse ranges of higher education programmes in Spain.

The UGR has been awarded with the "Human Resources Excellence in Research (HRS4R)", which reflects the the institution’s commitment to continuously improve its human resource policies in line with the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers. The UGR is also internationally renowned for its excellence in diverse research fields and ranked among the top Spanish universities in a variety of ranking criteria, such as national R&D projects, fellowships awarded, publications, and international funding.

The UGR is one of the few Spanish Universities listed in the Shanghai Top 500 ranking - Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). The 2023 edition of the ARWU places the UGR in 201-300th position in the world and as the 1-2 highest ranked University in Spain (http://sl.ugr.es/0dwJ), reaffirming its position as an institution at the forefront of national and international research. From the perspective of specialist areas in the ARWU rankings (http://sl.ugr.es/0bSp), the UGR is outstanding in Food Science & Technology (ranked in the 48th position in the world), Hospitality & Tourism Management (ranked between 51th-75th position), and in the areas of Mathematics and Library & Information Science, both of them ranked between 76th-100th position. A little lower in the ranking, the UGR also stands out in the areas of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science & Engineering and Nursing, in which the UGR is positioned at the rank in the 101-150th position. Finally, Dentistry & Oral Sciences is positioned between 151-200th position.

Additionally, the UGR counts with 9 researchers at the top of the Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list, most of them related to the Computer Science scientific area. It is also well recognised for its web presence (http://sl.ugr.es/0a6i), being positioned at 76th place in the top 200 Universities in Europe.

Internationally, the University of Granada is firmly committed to its participation in the calls of the Framework Programme of the European Union. For the duration of the last Framework Programme, Horizon 2020, the UGR obtained a total of 121 projects with a total funding of around €29,4 million. For the current Framework Programme, Horizon Europe, the UGR has obtained 74 projects, so far, with a total funding of almost €20 million.

Brief description of the Centre/Research Group:

The research team consist in an interdisciplinary collaboration of investigators from the departments of Chemical Engineering, Nutrition and Bromatology and Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry from the University of Granada. Both groups started their collaboration in 2015. The group’s main objective is the valorisation of agro-industrial biomass side products (BSP), through their use as feedstocks in the production of bioactive and prebiotic compounds, antioxidants, biosurfactants and other added-value biomolecules, as well as their application in bioremediation of soils. The strategy of this research line aims to cover all the development needed from the generation of the BSP, its pre-treatments (physical, chemical or biological), to the production of a biomolecule of interest.

Therefore, the research in the team encompasses a wide range of cross-disciplinary activities. More specifically, the research lines of the last five years comprise:

1.     Valorisation of olive oil mill waste and thermally processed food wastes (coffee grounds). Production of biosurfactants through microbial and fungal fermentations, and extraction of compounds with antioxidants productions.

2.     Valorisation of oily food-derived wastes. Production of di-, monoglycerides and fatty acids by hydrolysis in multiphases systems.

3.     Study of application of biosurfactants in emulsion system and their synergies with enzymatic reactions.

4.     Study of pre-treatments for food wastes and sub products in order to enhance their valorisation as added-value chemicals.

Dr. Moya Ramírez specializes in biological treatments and production processes, and is currently focused on the first research line, using approaches based on microbial co-cultures.

Project description:

The use of agro-industrial biomass side products (BSP) as raw materials can reduce the costs of biomanufacturing processes. However, the heterogeneity of BSP hinders their complete metabolization and/or transformation in a single industrial operation. This is due to their chemical diversity, which ranges from biopolymers such as cellulose, hemicellulose , or lignin to triglycerides or aromatic compounds.Therefore, some fractions of the BSP usually remain underutilised or are discarded. In this sense, microbial co-cultures, consortia of microorganisms comprising two or more co-existing species, allow to synergistically combine several microbial traits. These interactions are ubiquitous in nature. So learning how to manipulate and engineer microbial consortia could be critical to fully leverage the biotechnological potential of microorganisms.

Considering that, our main driving hypothesis is that co-cultures can be key to solve the problematic of the complete revalorisation of any BSP, regardless their composition or origin, and to achieve that in a single step. This is a field in development, due to the complex mechanisms controlling the population dynamics and inter-strain communications of the microbial consortia, and how they assemble and evolve. Therefore, we are currently working in two approaches to engineer microbial consortia. The first of them is based on strain containment techniques to enable the coexistence of several species of interest in the co-culture and to reach a precise control over their populations (bottom-up approach). Our second approach relies on different culture techniques in bioreactors in order to introduce exogenous strains with a trait of interest into an existing microbial consortia (top-down approach).

Research Area:

☒ Chemistry (CHE)

☒ Life Sciences (LIFE)

For a correct evaluation of your candidature, please send the documents below to Professor Ignacio Moya Ramírez (ignaciomr@ugr.es): 

• CV
• Letter of recommendation (optional)