With the future of the planet at stake, the composition and source of new materials is today more relevant than ever. On the whole, there is a growing demand for new advance materials with the desired optical, magnetic, electronic, structural and mechanical properties fulfilling the high expectations of our daily lives. Immediate applications related to architecture, communications, energy conversion and storage, healthcare or transport are involved. However, the current pace of innovation for manufacturing advance materials and devices is largely supported on the production, use and waste of huge amounts of resources as well as severe consumptions of energy, which unavoidably exerts a harmful contribution to the global climates on earth. In order to fit the balance between environment, resources and energy concerns, the implementation of new efficient strategies to alternatively produce these goods hence becomes an absolute priority and, in this context, the rational fabrication of hybrid materials like the ones targeted in this coordinated proposal, deliberately conceived to gather multiple possibilities, functions or modes in a one single platform, represents an extraordinary option towards sustainability. Materials of this kind constituted by well-defined hybrid configurations where the multimodality can occur at different scales, from nano through macro and on various temporal and compositional levels, can have tremendous potential to improve new systems performance. Reducing system complexity (number of elements required to perform a number of operations), reducing system size, weight and cost, lowering power consumption and simultaneously increasing the efficiency of processes, their versatility and safety, are among the direct and positive impacts that these hybrid multimodal platforms will make on the economic growth, the environment and the quality of life. 

Managed by two expert teams that will perform complementary investigations to coordinate the assembly of different organics-in-inorganics hybrid architectures, the aims set forward for such multimodal platforms in this project proposal will primary focus on two specific domains of sustainable development, namely the renewable production hydrogen and the prospects of personalized medicine. In the first case, semiconductor-based hierarchical units, up-converting luminescent nanostructures and donor-pi-acceptor dyes will be together assembled to produce multimodal platforms holding an improved photocatalytic performance and displaying multiple inputs and output capabilities to be used in the design of novel solar stations for hydrogen production. For the second family of hybrid materials, inorganic-organic core-shell structures will be devised where the electric, magnetic and optical properties of the inorganic core will be used in signal detection, transmission and amplification (multimodal imaging), while the subsequent anchoring of the organic shell will allow these platforms to identify unique biological molecules in biological fluids, to target a specific tissue/cell line and/or to deliver a therapeutic drug. 

Eventually, the project has been conceived to be intrinsically versatile, and so it is expected that the resulting innovations could be embraced in different fields of interest, contributing to support and drive climate change solutions in different technological areas.