Researcher Ernest Pastor wins the Ramón y Cajal Programme to work at INAM. Ernest Pastor (Picassent, 1989) received his PhD from Imperial College London where he worked in the study of photocatalytic systems for energy conversion using electrochemical and optical methods under the supervision of Prof James Durrant FRS. He later moved to the Berkeley National Laboratory in California and joined the Yachandra-Yano laboratory where he used x-ray free electron lasers to study how oxygen is produced in the Photosystem II. After this postdoc in the USA, Ernest returned to London and joined Artem Bakulin’s Ultrafast Optoelectronics Group at Imperial where he started developing optical experiments to characterize structural dynamics in solids. In 2019, this research led him to ICFO’s Ultrafast Dynamics in Quantum Material’s group led by Prof Simon Wall in Barcelona where, as a Juan de la Cierva Fellow, Ernest used ultrafast optical and x-ray lasers to understand how disorder influences the properties of functional solids. Currently, Ernest holds a La Caixa Junior Leader Fellowship and works at INAM with Prof Sixto Giménez.
The Ramón y Cajal programme
The Ramón y Cajal programme grants allow the creation of jobs with the possibility of permanent incorporation into the Spanish Science, Technology and Innovation System, i.e., they are a very important step towards stabilisation in a scientific career. The selection process is carried out by competitive examination on the basis of curricular merits and their ability to lead a line of research. For this reason, several aspects are key: contributions, participation in international activity and leadership capacity.
The grants have an annual amount of 33,720 euros to co-finance the salary and the employer's social security contributions of the contracted researchers. An additional grant of 40,000 euros is included. The programme is funded by the State Research Agency of the Ministry of Science and Innovation and by the European Social Fund 'Invest in your future'.
