Prof Giuseppe Battaglia (GB) is an ERC Consolidator grantee, and ICREA Research Professor. In 2019 GB was appointed senior group leader at the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia. GB also holds a chair in molecular bionics at the Department of Chemistry and Institute of Physics of Living System at the University College London. GB's position is 50/50 between ICREA/IBEC and UCL but will move 100% in Barcelona from 2022. GB was awarded the 2009 HFSP Young Investigator award, the 2011 APS/IoP Polymer Physics Exchange Award Lecture, the 2011 GSK Emerging Scientist Award, the 2012 Award for special contribution to Polymer Therapeutics, the 2014 RSC Thomas Graham Award Lecture, and the 2015 SCI/RSC McBain Medal for Colloid Science. GB was awarded a prestigious EPSRC Established Fellowship in 2016, an ERC Starting Grant in 2011, and an ERC Consolidator in 2018. GB was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Institute of Materials, Minerals & Mining. GB has published over 130 peer-reviewed papers and been named inventor in 13 patents.

GB leads a strong team of chemists, physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and biologists who work alongside to design bionic units that mimic specific biological functions and introduce operations that do not exist in Nature. A constructionist approach mimics biological complexity in design principles to produce functional units from simple building blocks and their interactions; ​ this approach is Molecular Bionics. The GB group is particularly interested in how molecules, macromolecules, viruses, vesicles, and whole cells traffic across our body barriers. The group combines novel microscopic tools with theoretical and computational physics to study biological transport from single molecules, cell membranes, and whole organisms. The acquired knowledge is thus translated to bioengineer novel nanomedicines, combining soft matter physics with synthetic chemistry.