IMDEA Materials Institute

The IMDEA Materials Institute (Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies of Materials) is a non-profit independent research organisation promoted by the Madrid regional government (Comunidad de Madrid) to perform research in Materials Science and Engineering. IMDEA Materials Institute belongs to the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies network, a new institutional framework created to foster social and economic growth in the region of Madrid by promoting research of excellence and technology transfer to industry in a number of strategic areas (water, food, energy, materials, nanoscience, networks and software). IMDEA Materials Institute is committed to three main goals: excellence in Materials Science and Engineering research, technology transfer to industry to increase competitiveness and maintain technological leadership, and attraction of talented researchers from all over the world to work in Madrid in an international and interdisciplinary environment. The Institute´s research team approaches its R&D activities from two different perspectives that are always founded on excellence in research. The first one is a bottom-up approach which goes from the fundamentals to the applications where key scientific knowledge (i.e. breakthroughs) is generated to develop or improve materials and/or processes leading to industrial innovations. The second approach is a top-down strategy that begins with a technological challenge for an application identified by industry. The research is then focussed on the fundamentals that allow the real understanding of the problem and enabling a solution to be designed, leading to a strategy that goes from the applications to the fundamentals.