RSEQ awards INAM-UJI researcher Nishant Singh as leader of a research team focused on the creation of dynamic life-like systems
The Young Researcher Award in the group leader category recognizes innovative breakthroughs by emerging leaders in the field of chemistry
image: Nishant Singh, a researcher at the Institute of Advanced Materials at the Universitat Jaume I in Castelló, has been awarded the 2025 Young Researcher Award in the group leader category by the Royal Spanish Society of Chemistry (RSEQ), a distinction that recognizes innovative advances by emerging leaders in the field of chemistry. The award ceremony will be held in November in Valencia. Nishant Singh is head of the DyMSaS (Dynamic Materials and Self-Assembling Systems) Laboratory, a team focused on creating dynamic systems similar to life, such as cells synthesized from different chemical components. The aim is to develop dynamic supramolecular materials, in which small molecules assemble to give rise to collective properties that are more sophisticated and advanced than the simple sum of their parts.
Credit: Universitat Jaume I of Castellón
Nishant Singh, a researcher at the Institute of Advanced Materials at the Universitat Jaume I in Castelló, has been awarded the 2025 Young Researcher Award in the group leader category by the Royal Spanish Society of Chemistry (RSEQ), a distinction that recognizes innovative advances by emerging leaders in the field of chemistry. The award ceremony will be held in November in Valencia.
Nishant Singh is head of the DyMSaS (Dynamic Materials and Self-Assembling Systems) Laboratory, a team focused on creating dynamic systems similar to life, such as cells synthesized from different chemical components. The aim is to develop dynamic supramolecular materials, in which small molecules assemble to give rise to collective properties that are more sophisticated and advanced than the simple sum of their parts.
The latest work published by the team in the prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society in early 2025 presents the characteristics and results obtained with coacervates, artificial models of cells that exhibit life-like properties such as budding (cell division) and membrane formation. They are one of the promising models that simulate protocells (artificial cells) and are considered one of the first life-like structures. Among their capabilities is the ability to encapsulate other substances, which could make them a transport system for drug delivery.
A young but intense research career
The young scientist is a distinguished researcher in the GenT programme of the Generalitat Valenciana, a programme that supports talented researchers. His main scientific interest is in supramolecular and systems chemistry, with a special focus on systems out of equilibrium. These chemical systems mimic biological processes in which chemical energy is consumed to maintain an active and functional state: they produce waste, can reproduce or replicate, and “die” when their energy source is depleted.
Nishant Singh obtained his PhD in 2016 from the Universitat Jaume I (UJI), for which he received the Extraordinary Doctorate Award. In 2017, he moved to the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, where he worked on combinatorial systems for drug delivery targeting breast cancer and antibiotic resistance.
In 2018, he joined the Institute of Supramolecular Science and Engineering (ISIS) at the University of Strasbourg with an individual Marie Curie fellowship, focusing his research on non-equilibrium self-assemblies and reaction cycles. In 2022, he was awarded a CIDEGENT grant to start his own research group at the Institute of Advanced Materials (INAM) at the UJI. He has been nominated as an emerging researcher in ChemSystemsChem and was recently interviewed about his work in the prestigious journal Angewandte Chemie.