Archive

Considering geopolitical tensions and power shifts, there is an increasing need for better understanding climate safety and security

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the ERC Starting Grants for young researchers. Five of them are scientists from TU Delft. This European grant of €1.5 million for a five-year research programme is intended to enable individual scientists to build their own teams and conduct groundbreaking research.

Researchers from Delft established a way to address many quantum dots with only a few control lines using a chessboard-like method. This enabled the operation of the largest gate-defined quantum dot system ever. Their result is an important step in the development of scalable quantum systems for practical quantum technology. They publish their results in Nature Nanotechnology.

Delft University of Technology and its Kavli Institute of Nanoscience received a five-million-dollar grant from The Kavli Foundation to fund a collaborative effort to develop the quantum equivalent of telecommunication.

Thanks to Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, Delft is known as the birthplace of microbiology. In the national Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Year, TU Delft honours this passionate and curious researcher and his contributions to microbiology with a series of podcasts, stories, tours and activities.

Stel je voor dat je je als een echte zeiler aan boord waant bij jouw favoriete zeilteam en van dichtbij getuige kunt zijn van het strategisch manoeuvreren van de WK-zeilers. Deze lang gekoesterde droom van elke zeilliefhebber wordt werkelijkheid met de Sailing+ Experience app, een technologie ontwikkeld door onderzoekers van TU Delft.

The Dutch Research Council (NOW) has awarded Veni funding of up to EUR 280,000 to 188 promising researchers from the full breadth of science. In the fields of Applied and Technical Sciences (TTW) and Exact and Natural Sciences (ENW), seventeen scientists from TU Delft have been honoured. This will allow the laureates to further develop their own research ideas over the next three years.

The premiere of Dancing in the Desert will take place on Wednesday, 23 August, at 2 pm on the Delft Markt town square. Admission is free. In this beautiful documentary, a team of filmmakers including Bram van Splunteren follow the student team working on the Nuna 11. It’s an exciting job, especially when you realise that the Nuna 10 caught fire during the previous Solar Challenge in Australia. Will these students succeed in designing and building an entirely new Nuna from scratch? Will it finish the race through the Moroccan desert and maybe even win it?

Nineteen consortia receive funding to work on scientific and societal breakthroughs. Of these, two NWA-ORC awards go to TU Delft scientists. Active collaboration between different research disciplines, different knowledge institutions and with public sectors and industry are at the core of the projects. The projects have received funding in the fourth round of the Dutch Research Agenda programme Research along Routes by Consortia (NWA-ORC).

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) announced its contribution of 15 million euros to PlantXR, a CropXR research programme into 'smart breeding' of extra resilient crops (eXtra Resilient, XR). This impulse brings CropXR's total budget to over €90 million for the next 10 years. NWO’s grant marks the start of the new Dutch institute CropXR, which integrates plant biology, computational modelling, and artificial intelligence into 'smart breeding methods'. Those will be used to develop crop varieties that are more resilient to climate change and less dependent on chemical crop protection. In CropXR, TU Delft works together with Utrecht University, Wageningen University and Research, the University of Amsterdam and dozens of plant breeding, biotech and processing companies on basic scientific research, data collection and data sharing, education, and advancing broad application of the results.

On 30 June, the Dutch government announced a new set of National Growth Fund investments, which will enable the Netherlands to gain and maintain a strong position in areas such as battery technology, 6G and sustainable steel production.

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded a grant to research on more efficient production of even smaller computer chips in the KIC call ‘Demand-driven Partnerships for Consortia’. Researchers from Delft University of Technology and ARCNL are collaborating with ASML in order to inspect computer chips more precisely and faster with help of electrons. The Knowledge and Innovation Covenant (KIC) research programme stands for pioneering innovative solutions with social and economic impact. NWO funds the research with almost 2 million euros, ASML contributes with over 2.3 million co-funding.

Staff shortages and the constant desire to provide high-quality medical care. These are only two of the most important reasons for a sharp increase in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare in the coming years. By launching the first healthcare AI Ethics Lab, Erasmus MC and TU Delft put the focus on ethically responsible and clinically relevant AI that will positively impact both patient care and healthcare workers.

On Thursday 15 June, the mayor of Amsterdam (Femke Halsema) and the chief executive officers of Wageningen University & Research (Sjoukje Heimovaara) and TU Delft (Tim van der Hagen) signed a declaration of intent on behalf of the three parties for the next phase of AMS Institute.

Dimitris Dermentzoglou, PhD student in Coastal Engineering, investigates whether salt marshes can serve as a natural solution for coastal protection. It is why he mimics salt marsh vegetation at the TU Delft Waterlab. He hopes his research will yield a more sustainable alternative to the repeated raising of dikes.

Het afgelopen jaar heeft TU in kaart gebracht wat de gevolgen zijn van de groei van de universiteit. De instroom van studenten is de afgelopen jaren flink gestegen en blijft dit naar aller waarschijnlijkheid doen. Dit legt steeds meer druk op de campus en de stad Delft, terwijl er tegelijkertijd groeiende maatschappelijke behoefte is aan (Delftse) ingenieurs.

To accelerate the use of natural materials in construction, today The Green Village, iCircl and the Province of South Holland opened the new living lab Biobased Boulevard. This living lab, part of fieldlab The Green Village on TU Delft Campus, will help to use biobased building materials in construction and renovation on a large scale.

In the centre of The Hague and 'around the corner' from the current Parliament, TU Delft opened its new location in The Hague for the new strategic programme TU Delft | The Hague. TU Delft | The Hague is designed with the aim of better involving state-of-the-art engineering in political and executive decision-making, policy-making and implementation. The TU Delft | The Hague programme has three focus themes: Climate & Energy, Digitalisation and Safety & Security.

Een delegatie van het J.M. Burgerscentrum heeft de petitie “Alles stroomt in Nederland” aangeboden aan de Vaste Kamercommissie voor Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap (VKC-OCW) in de Tweede Kamer in Den Haag. Er wordt gevraagd om erkenning van het belang voor Nederland van de ingenieurswetenschappen, in het bijzonder van de stromingsleer.

Building a better society is the mission of the university in the context of Science, Engineering and Design. That’s what TU Delft stands for. More attention to Lifelong Learning (LLL) fits within this ambition and involves providing high-quality, accessible education to professionals.

The recent news is abundantly clear: severe weather, yellow code alerts, and water damage in large parts of the country. Due to climate change, we can expect more heat and drought, but also more rainfall in a short period of time.

Monday, May 22 2023, during Biodiversity Day, TU Delft is launching a collaboration with Waarneming.nl to make the TU Delft Campus more green and vibrant. René Hoonhout and Tim Tabak from EcoCampus gave tours to students and staff to discover and capture plants, animals and organisms on campus. Monitoring the biodiversity is an important part of the sustainability ambition of the TU Delft to be carbon neutral, climate-adaptive and circular by 2030 with a focus on improving biodiversity and quality of life. René Hoonhout: "We are moving towards a nature-inclusive way of management. By making observations, we can measure whether this contributes the improvement of biodiversity."

A major challenge in the energy transition is the efficient and flexible storage and transportation of renewable energy. Batteries will play an important role in this. However, much research and innovation are still required. In order to encourage this, on Thursday 11 May 2023 TU Delft will be launching e4BatteryDelft: a brand-new platform that will focus on electrochemical storage of renewable energy – with respect for the world around us, in a way that is affordable and also totally European.

Solar energy is the cheapest and most accessible form of energy. Now, it will be more efficient than ever.

Professors Marileen Dogterom, Herman Russchenberg, Jilt Sietsma and Peter Vink all received royal honours on 26 April 2023.

The Innovation District Delft will make a positive contribution to the major societal challenges, which also impact the region and city.

A dart that is less sensitive to player errors and is therefore almost 50% more accurate than a conventional dart. TU Delft researchers may have developed a groundbreaking dart that can significantly improve the performance of elite-level darts players.

Two protein complexes carry the major responsibility for the spatial organisation of chromosomes in our cell nuclei. DNA tension plays a surprising role in this. Together with Austrian colleagues, nanoscientist Cees Dekker and his PhD candidate Roman Barth of the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at TU Delft now publish how they have visualised this in detail in Nature on April 19.

DNA replication is the process whereby cells make an exact copy of their DNA before cell division. A key part of the intricate DNA replication machinery is a molecular motor called CMG, which has the vital task of separating the two strands of the DNA double helix so that they can be copied. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from TU Delft has now developed a new methodology to assemble and image the motion of CMG with unprecedented resolution.

On 12 April a number of covenants were signed in the presence of Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf of Education, Culture and Science and his French colleague Sylvie Retailleau to intensify the collaboration between both countries in the field of science. One of the covenants focuses on the collaboration between TU Delft and French universities and businesses. For TU Delft this represents an important step in terms of research into sustainable aviation.

The board of NWO Domain Applied and Engineering Sciences awards funding to seven research projects through the Open Technology Programme. Three of the total seven proposals have been awarded to Delft researchers. In total, NWO is funding the projects with 5.8 million euros, companies involved and other organisations are investing 900 thousand euros.