Structured functional glasses for lasing sensing and health applications

Over the past four decades, glasses, glass-ceramics and composites have contributed to achieving the most advanced socio-economic breakthroughs steadily as advanced high-tech materials. To highlight the importance of glass, 2022 has been declared International Year of Glass by the United Nations.

To compete with emerging economies like China and India, the European glass sector is challenged to seek product leadership by investing more in research and innovation in order to develop new materials and to train specialists for a competitive but promising market.

Contributing to this challenge is the main aim of this project Structured functional glasses for lasing, sensing and health applications (FunctiGlass), a unique interdisciplinary double-degree research and training program. It aims at impacting advanced high-tech materials for three sectors: Light sources, Sensors and Bio-applications.

FunctiGlass program will fully train 11 Doctoral Candidates (DCs) who will participate in a joint research training program built on very strong academia/industry cooperation.

It guarantees the exposure of Researchers to 11 academic (universities and research institutes) and 9 non-academic environments (industry and SMEs) representing 9 different countries.

Each DC will be supervised by two academic tutors and one mentor (industrial partner) to guarantee inter-sectorial knowledge sharing and acquisition of transferable skills with emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation.

With the multi-dimensional training of FunctiGlass program, the 11 DCs will excel in the future economy by acquiring a multi-faceted perspective and a growing mindset to become the future leaders in glass science and especially in nano/micro-structured glass-based materials. With this program, the DCs will find their own future innovative path in academia or industry.

This program will create the grounds for establishing long-term relations between the academic and private sectors for technology and compete