The “la Caixa” Banking Foundation and the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC Barcelona) have renewed the cooperation agreement referring to the Obra Social “la Caixa” doctoral fellowship programme, by providing funding for two post-doctoral grants, each worth €45,000, intended for researchers from international research centres.

These calls have been launched in efforts to award grants that enable postdoctoral researchers to join a research group at UIC Barcelona and, by doing so, promote the internationalisation of the University’s research.

The researchers that have joined UIC Barcelona on a postdoctoral fellowship from the “la Caixa” Banking Foundation are Lorenzo Chelleri and José Luis Domínguez.

Chelleri is involved in socio-spatial analysis for post-disaster and post-conflict regeneration, a line of research linked to the Master’s Degree in International Cooperation: Sustainable Emergency Architecture at the ESARQ - School of Architecture, where he provides a multidisciplinary perspective on resistance based on his social sciences background. In fact, he explores the origin and evolution of resistance to urban systems. Domínguez, a specialist in bioinformatics, has also been a multidisciplinary addition to the NeuroLipid Research Group headed by Dr Nuria Casals, which is linked to the Department of Basic Sciences of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. The project in which José Luis Domínguez is involved seeks to use bioinformatics tools to create a structural model of a brain protein, the purpose of which is to design drugs that regulate this protein and use such drugs to control appetite when treating obesity.

Present at the signing of the agreement were Dr Xavier Gil, rector of UIC Barcelona and Jordi Portabella, director of Research and Knowledge for the “la Caixa” Banking Foundation, alongside programme director Dr Toni Mora, vice-rector of Research, Innovation and Knowledge Transfer at UIC Barcelona.

The “la Caixa” Banking Foundation develops programmes that promote social action, research and health, culture and education, with a desire to transform. It is particularly supportive of outstanding research projects in biomedicine and health, yet also strives to make science and the research process in general more accessible to the public as a whole, involving them in the advances and repercussions of research performed here in Spain. It is also engaged in promoting an increasingly more favourable and better informed opinion of research among the population.