Portraits of Science ‘I woke up in the middle of the night and just knew: we would build this platform’ What do you do when the coronavirus crisis brings your student project to a halt? For Eco-Runner Team Manager Antonios Kouzelis it was an easy decision: arrange an alternative! Besides which he and two friends also set up the website kiezeninquarantaine.nl (choosing while in quarantine), just like that. ‘Rapid development of LEDs offers all kinds of medical potential’ You can use ultraviolet light from LEDs to combat coronavirus. But it’s not as simple as commercial providers are presenting it right now, concludes Professor Guoqi Zhang. On the need for a sound scientific basis and the potential for LEDs in medical applications. ‘Coronavirus has brought the service team closer to the faculty’ The buildings were virtually empty and an icy silence filled the corridors, but colleagues in Service Cluster 3 have continued their hard work since the outbreak of coronavirus. ‘Once the dust had settled, it was time to focus on quality’ Developing an online course normally takes about nine months. So when all education had to be provided online in mid-March, Teaching & Learning Services had to pull out all the stops. Learning Developers coordinator Sofia Dopper reflects on a hectic period, which also gave satisfaction. ‘Making big problems manageable and solving them: that’s what we do as engineers’ Switching to online education in the middle of the semester wasn’t easy for anyone, but how do you do that for a course in which building and testing are so important? Lecturer Michiel Schuurman took it as an opportunity to innovate the production process. ‘We’ve achieved a nice modus operandi’ You need a lot of practical training to become a mechanical engineer. So how do you achieve that for 2,500 Bachelor's students in the time of coronavirus? Programme Director René Delfos has quite a job on his hands, but he's keeping on top of it thanks to the help of colleagues like John Lander from Campus Real Estate. Campus mobility dashboard to monitor crowd behavior at TU Delft For years, Distinguished Professor Smart Urban Mobility Serge Hoogendoorn had been dreaming of a sensor network for research into traffic flows. The fact that it would happen on the TU Delft campus was never part of the dream. A perfect case of “never waste a good crisis”. ‘This is the kind of education students have been asking for’ ‘We were able to crowdsource professional assistance from across the world’ When Covid-19 struck, Anteneh Tesfaye Tola worried about family and friends in Ethiopia. Supported by the Delft Global Initiative, he was able to take some time off from his PhD research to focus on developing design guidelines for the setting up of emergency medical facilities in Ethiopia. In that way, he was able to assist his country from afar. ‘They were difficult months, but also some of the best’ Professor Jaap Harlaar (3mE) had 25 students with no internships to go to but also saw a looming shortage of ventilators. Combining the two brought about OperationAIR, a textbook example of fast-track medical innovation. 'The lines of contact were suddenly a lot shorter because of coronavirus' TPM student Zara-Vé van Tetterode was chair of the Delft Student Council when coronavirus arrived. She is very positive about the cooperation with the Executive Board during the crisis, but she also sees how coronavirus threatens the mental health of students. Share this page: Facebook Linkedin Twitter Email WhatsApp Share this page
