Professor Xavier Oliver has been awarded this year an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (ERC). This initiative of the IDEAS Programme of the European Commission funds distinguished researchers in Europe for developing an innovative and challenging project that can lead to results of high impact in any field of science and technology.

The Advanced Grants Programme of the ERC evaluates projects presented by individuals on the basis of three criteria: The project idea, the curriculum vitae of the proposer and the research environment where the project will be developed. The project of Prof. Oliver has been awarded with 2,4 million euro for a 5 year period. The project will be carried out at the International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE) of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC).

The project is entitled "COMP-DES-MAT: Advanced tools for computational design of engineering materials". The overall goal of the project is to contribute to the consolidation of the nascent and revolutionary philosophy of "Materials by Design" by resorting to the enormous power provided by the nowadays available computational techniques.

Prof. Oliver is a Professor on Structural Analysis in the School of Civil Engineering of UPC and the President of the Spanish Association for Numerical Methods in Engineering (SEMNI). He is also a recognized expert at worldwide level in the field of computational structural mechanics.

The Advanced Grant of Prof. Xavier Oliver adds to the other three ERC Grants awarded to CIMNE in recent years: the Advanced Grants awarded to Dr. Sergio Idelsohn in 2009 and to Prof. Eugenio Oñate in 2010 and the Starting Grant awarded to Dr Santiago Badia in 2010.