Founded in 1923, the National Research Council (CNR) is the largest public research institute in Italy. The main goals of the institution are to promote innovation and competitiveness by supporting scientific and technological research.

CNR participates to the LUCRA project through the Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie Chimiche “Giulio Natta” (CNR-SCITEC), whose headquarter is in Milano. CNR-SCITEC possesses a strong expertise in polymer science including design, synthesis, formulation, characterization and development of advanced polymeric materials for application in the field of packaging and agri-food, rubber technology, opto-electronics, automotive, energy storage and harvesting and life science. To achieve functional and/or structural polymeric  materials with designed performance and to gain in-depth information on process-structure-morphology-properties correlations, specific expertises have been consolidated over years on the following aspects:

i) synthesis of monomers, oligomers and polymers, also addressing the issues of reaction/curing mechanism and kinetics; ii) physical, reactive melt blending and compounding to produce blends, micro- and nanocomposites; iii) surface modification of polymers and other substrates, e.g. fillers, fibers; iv) molecular, structural, spectroscopic, thermal, mechanical characterization of polymers and polymeric materials; v) morphological/morphometric analysis of multiphasic micro- and nanostructured polymer systems by optical (OM), transmission (TEM) and scanning (SEM-EDX) electron microscopy aided by automated image analysis (AIA).

SCITEC is also skilled in science communication through conception, support, dissemination and evaluation of activities also measuring the impact of dissemination.