Entrepreneurship is widely accepted as a key driver of economic growth and is a central policy priority across the world, including in the EU through initiatives such as the EU’s Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan. While access to capital is viewed as one of the biggest hurdles to starting and growing a new business, the manner in which financing constraints for startups are invoked in academic work and policy frameworks is often poorly fleshed out. This lack of clarity is also reflected in the way policy makers sometimes invoke images of Silicon-Valley-type venture capital (VC) backed entrepreneurship when proposing reforms that are tailored towards small businesses with low growth potential. My ERC CoG project aims to quantify and address financing frictions facing ‘high potential entrepreneurship’ through three related areas of inquiry: 1. Characterizing the financing sources and constraints facing high-potential entrepreneurs and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) that are responsible for driving employment and productivity growth in the economy. 2. Developing adaptations to venture capital’s funding model to overcome specific financing hurdles facing the translation and scale-up of science-based ‘tough tech’ ventures. 3. Understanding the dynamics of agglomeration in emerging industries, with a particular focus on how capital markets policy can impact where clusters of frontier technologies emerge.

OptiCarb overall aim is to understand the fundamental mechanisms of sodium-ion intercalation/adsorption in hard carbon anodes and find the optimum carbon atomic configuration that maximises the sodium storage capacity. Experimentally it is difficult to unravel the mechanistic nature of sodium-carbon interactions, due to the complex atomic structure of hard carbons. Therefore, theoretical studies based on molecular simulations are crucial, as they can achieve atomistic resolution. However, up to date there is no realistic model capturing the microstructural complexity of hard carbons available in the literature, which hinders the subsequent study of the sodium-hard carbon interface. In this computational project I will use molecular dynamics simulations and an innovative methodology to generate realistic models of hard carbon anodes that capture porous and pseudo-graphitic domains into a single 3D-connected nanostructure. Our models will allow us to systematically study Na intercalation between pseudo-graphitic layers and Na adsorption in the confined space of carbon pores, which are key to optimise the Na storage capacity. To ensure maximum impact of the gained knowledge from our theoretical studies, I will closely work with experimentalists in my host group to validate and correlate our models with experimental data and guide the experimental design of optimised anodes with high Coulombic efficiency and high capacity. This will push the performance of Na-ion batteries to active long cycles (over 10000), high energy density (above 400 Wh/kg) and high Coulombic efficiency above 96%, making them competitive with commercial Li-ion batteries and paving the way for its large-scale commercialisation.

Resveratrol (3,4',5-trihydroxystilbene) and its derivatives (e.g., pterostilbene, piceatannol, and viniferin) are naturally occurring compounds found in plants and have various medicinal properties, including anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, anti-cancer and many other activities. Therefore, they are commercialised as components of many medicines, nutritional supplements, healthy foods, and cosmetics. However, plants typically have low concentrations of resveratrol (e.g., 5.1 μg/g in peanut and 3.9 mg/g in Rheum rhaponticum). Extracting resveratrol from plants is a traditional method with notable drawbacks, including long growth times (several years), high costs, low yields, land and labor waste, and pollution of the environment. The chemical synthesis of resveratrol involves complex steps, uses hazardous solvents, and generates toxic byproducts. Due to these reasons, biotechnological production of resveratrol by recombinant microorganisms is a promising strategy to solve the above issues. The current production of resveratrol synthesised by mono-culturing yeast remains relatively low, with productions in shake flasks being less than 1 g/L. Microbial co-culture is a cooperation strategy where microorganisms survive by feeding on the metabolic products of neighbors. This approach alleviates the significant metabolic burden associated with engineering a single strain to handle the entire biosynthetic pathway of metabolites. It promises to increase final production compared to the mono-culture. This proposed study relates to a novel approach in resveratrol biosynthesis by Y. lipolytica, which will address a critical question in today's resveratrol biosynthesis research: can the co-culture of Y. lipolytica engineered strains using lignocellulose as a sustainable carbon source significantly improve resveratrol production and promote the industrialisation of resveratrol biosynthesis in Europe?