Paulo Rocha and Bárbara Gomes, scientists from the University of Coimbra (UC), have just been awarded with “Starting Grant” grants from the European Research Council (ERC), worth four million euros.
Paulo Rocha, from the Functional Ecology Center of the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Coimbra (FCTUC), receives 2.2 million euros to complete the project “Green – Generating Energy from Electroactive Algae”, which aims to generate clean energy and sustainable through communication between algae.
For the researcher, this five-year project “is aligned with the development of a new source of clean, low-cost energy, with a view to significantly minimizing electricity costs, the use of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions. carbon dioxide”.
Paulo Rocha, who expresses “immense pride in having been selected in one of the most competitive programs in the world of science. And, also, proud to be able to develop this project in Portugal, at the University of Coimbra”, reveals that the award of this European scholarship will allow the creation of a world renowned laboratory in Bioenergy and Bioelectronics.
Bárbara Gomes, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra (FMUC), obtained 1.8 million euros to carry out an innovative study on the experiences of citizens in relation to the place where they prefer to die and where they really die, entitled “EOLinPLACE – Choice of where we die”. The research will be carried out in four countries with contrasting realities – Portugal, the Netherlands, Uganda and the United States.
This project, which will contribute to increase humanization and quality in the provision of health care at the end of life, “aims to transform the way we classify and understand the places where people are cared for at the end of their life and where they end up dying.
We will refine the current classifications, which are incomplete and inconsistent across countries, such as, for example, the classification of place of death that is used in death certificates. We will also shift the focus of our attention from the ultimate place of death to the individual trajectory of the end of life that precedes it, which we believe will help to better understand what causes people to die where they die”, says Bárbara Gomes, researcher at the Center of Innovation in Biomedicine and Biotechnology (CIBB) of the University of Coimbra.
With funding from the European Research Council now obtained, the team led by Bárbara Gomes, which brings together researchers from various fields – medicine, nursing, statistics and psychometrics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics and research in health services -, will develop qualitative and quantitative studies over the next five years, working side by side with “representatives of patients and their families, and following people with potentially fatal diseases over time, with the aim of creating a solid scientific basis for a contemporary and international classification pioneer that will allow mapping the places where people prefer to be cared for and where they are really cared for. Thus, we will be able to capture the diversity of individual trajectories at the end of life and enable choices”.
Regarding the impact that this research may have on health care at the end of life, the researcher at King’s College London believes that, “in a changing world, with an increasing need for good end-of-life and palliative care, expanded in the In this pandemic context, and with limited resources, this project will open new paths to better take care of those who are about to leave us, due to progressive and incurable disease, whether they are adults, adolescents or children.
With new knowledge about individual end-of-life trajectories and an international classification that can be used to plan care and monitor health outcomes, we will help people to be cared for, to live and to die where they prefer to be”.
The European Research Council was created in 2007 by the European Union (EU) to finance scientists of excellence. “ERC Starting Grants” fellowships are aimed at scientists at the beginning of their careers, enabling them to form working groups and develop projects in different scientific areas.
