Salvador Pané i Vidal

Dr. Salvador Pané i Vidal (Barcelona, 1980) is currently a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS) at ETH Zürich.  He received a B.S. (2003), M.S (2004) and a PhD in Chemistry (2008) from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) in the field of the electrodeposition of magnetic composites and magnetorresistive alloys.  He became a postdoctoral researcher at IRIS in August 2008 and Senior Research Scientist in 2012.  He has authored or co-authored more than 100 articles in international peer-reviewed journals and books for education in science.  Dr. Pané is currently working on bridging chemistry and electrochemistry with robotics at small scales.  In the field of micro- and nanororobotics, his major focus has been the miniaturization of magnetic materials and conductive polymers and hydrogels for targeted drug delivery.  He is the head of the IRIS electrochemistry laboratory at ETH, which he established in 2010. At present, he teaches a course on nanorobotics and supervises several on-going PhD theses. He has established successful international collaborations with several research groups (Autonomous University of Barcelona, University of Barcelona, University of Würzburg, Boğaziçi University, University of Orléans, Michigan State University, University of Hamburg) and companies and institutions (Hirtenberger AG, IGS Research, EMPA, Steiger AG). Dr. Pané has been also the coordinator for the FET Open project (Magnetic Nanoactuators for Quantitative Analysis), funded by the EU commission under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013). In June 2013, Dr. Pané was awarded the highly competitive Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). The grant provides 1.5 million euros over five years to investigate composite nanomaterials with magnetoelectric properties for chemical and biomedical applications. Since 2015, he is the Chair of the COST Action “e-MINDS: Electrochemical processing methodologies and corrosion protection for device and systems miniaturization” which brings together more than 40 European academic and industrial participants related to the areas of electrochemical manufacturing and corrosion science. Since 2016, he serves in the board of editors in the journal Applied Materials Today (Elsevier). He represents Switzerland in the European Academy of Surface Technology. He is also co-founder of the startup Magnes AG. In November 2017 was awarded a Consolidator Grant (ERC). The Grant provides 2.0 million euros over five years to develop gated porous nanorobots that can be remotely instructed to produce electrical fields.  In future, these nanorobots could be used in the spinal cord or the optical nerve.