Maryam Abdinejad receives grant from the European Research Council

The European Research Council has awarded Maryam Abdinejad an ERC Starting Grant of EUR 1.5 million. ERC Starting Grants are awarded to some of Europe's most promising early-career researchers, enabling them to build their own research teams and pursue groundbreaking ideas.

The grant will fund Maryam's new project, SHECO₂, which addresses one of the major challenges of the climate crisis: how to efficiently capture CO₂ directly from the atmosphere using renewable energy.

The technology behind the project is known as electrochemical direct air capture (e-DAC), where specialized molecular compounds use green electricity to extract CO₂ from the air. Although e-DAC holds immense potential, current systems are constrained by the low solubility of the active molecules in water, rapid oxygen degradation, and significant energy loss.

With SHECO₂, Maryam Abdinejad aims to develop a completely new class of stable, quinone-based materials that overcome these limitations. By combining computational models with advanced spectroscopy measurements, the project will uncover the fundamental chemical reactions. The goal is to integrate these tailored molecules into 3D flow-through electrodes, creating an energy-efficient, scalable, and fully functional technology for direct CO₂ capture.

Read more at the European Research Council .