The Russian Science Foundation announced the results of the infrastructure grant and the World Class Lab grant. Eleven Skoltech projects will receive financial support.
The largest grant — 108 million rubles for 2023-2026 (RUS) — was awarded to the project of Professor Artem Abakumov, the director of Skoltech Energy. The aim of the project is to develop the next generation of electrochemical batteries. The project is co-financed by an industrial partner — InEnergy Group.
“The lab prioritizes designing new materials for the next generation of electrochemical energy storage systems based on a deep understanding of the complex hierarchical microstructure of such materials. A significant part of our work is the development of scalable synthesis technologies and the creation of battery cell demonstrators. We also want to secure the rights to the created intellectual property. In our project, we plan to get a synergistic effect from a combination of fundamental scientific approaches and the Skoltech experience in the pilot production of electrode materials and lithium-ion batteries,” Abakumov says.
RSF also extended grants (RUS) to two laboratories for the next three years, allocating 72 million rubles each. Funding will be provided to Artem R. Oganov’s Material Discovery Laboratory to create new methods of computational materials discovery, as well as to Principal Research Scientist Evgeny Kuznetsov from the Laboratory of Integrable Systems and Turbulence of the Center for Advanced Studies to continue the research into turbulence and coherent structures in integrable and nonintegrable systems initiated by Vladimir Zakharov.
RSF also supported 24 infrastructure facilities (RUS) with grants, where 119 research projects will be implemented. The Skoltech Research Facilities Center secured eight projects: seven applications for high-resolution imaging (electron microscopy) and one for mass spectrometry.
“Our center [the Advanced Imaging Core Facility] has a unique infrastructure as we have the full range of equipment for conducting research using various techniques and preparing samples for these studies,” the head of the Advanced Imaging Core Facility, Iaroslava Shakhova, says. “And technicians and engineers have an outstanding set of competences. It is not enough to get an image, it is important to interpret the results correctly and a lot depends on the operator conducting the study. Our work is not limited to routine processing: The center’s clients receive a report, and operators become co-authors of scientific publications. For the facility, receiving a grant is beneficial not only in terms of funding but also as popularization of its work. When we opened, no one knew about us, and now researchers who worked with us are referring their colleagues to us.”
“The infrastructure-based research competition has been held for the third time, and the Research Facilities Center has been participating in it from the start. In the previous two competitions, the center provided services for projects in the fields of ecology, biomedicine, new materials, and alternative energy. This year, the scope of projects has expanded: Semiconductor electronics and photonics have been added to the above-mentioned areas. Photonics is a priority research area for Skoltech. Over the past few years, the Institute has been actively developing its research infrastructure to solve the most advanced tasks in this area,” Research Facilities Center Director Alexey Denisov says.
RSF will also allocate 28 million rubles until 2026 to each of the two projects of the Photonics Center. The grant will be awarded to Denis Sannikov, deputy head of the Hybrid Photonics Laboratory, for all-optical lateral logic circuits based on polariton condensates in perovskites films, as well as to Leading Research Scientist Aleksey Yashchenok for functional magnetic beads for the isolation of extracellular vesicles and evaluation of their pathological capacity. Six more research projects will be carried out in the interests of external customers: researchers from MIPT, ITMO, Moscow State University, Tomsk National Research Medical Center, and Bashkir State University.
Infrastructure-based grants of the Russian Science Foundation amount to 7 million rubles for the project, up to 20% of which (1.4 million rubles) can be used to pay for the infrastructure facility.
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