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The High Performance Computing consortium in the Netherlands, also known as the HPC competence center, is receiving 2.5 million euros to further strengthen the Dutch High Performance Computing community. The consortium is led by SURF and involves all major universities. Still, there are immediate consequences for the HPC ecosystem at TU Delft, more specifically for DelftBlue. The grant will make it possible to obtain training for our users from Surf, implementation of software containers, that would be transferable between DelftBlue and Surf machines, and we will become part of the advisory board of the NCC Netherlands, which boosts our visibility.

Last September, during the World Congress of Sports Medicine in Guadalajara Mexico, Larisa Gomaz received the Young Investigator Award 2022. The jury awarded Larisa with the first place for her presentation on injury risk prediction in sports. The aim of her research is to develop individualized and tailor-made prediction models on injury risk and sports performance by incorporating heterogeneous training and health data from various sources.

Larisa Gomaz is a PhD at our faculty. She currently works on the Perspective Project Citius, Altius Sanius. The Sports Medicine World Congress is a biannual event organised by the International Federation of Sports Medicine (FIMS) with the support of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The aim of the congress is to enhance knowledge sharing among experts in Sport Medicine and Applied Sports Science.

At the MNE 2022, the leading conference in Nano and Micro-engineering, Sten Vollebregt of the Microelectronics department was awarded the Young Investigator Award 2022. The jury, comprised of experts from the entire field, praised Sten’s outstanding contributions to Reproducible Wafer-scale Microfabrication with Carbon-based Materials. The aim of the award is to honor and promote a young and active researcher in the field of Nanofabrication and Nanotechnology for life  sciences, physics, chemistry and environmental sciences.

Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed and the leading cause of death by cancer for women worldwide. Part of the breast cancer patients are HER2+, meaning they overexpress the HER2 oncogene, causing their tumours to be more aggressive. On the other hand, these HER2+ tumours often respond well to anti-tumour treatment where the eradication of the tumour cells in the main goal. The number of courses required for this varies greatly from patient to patient. Currently, patients are however always treated with the same amount of anti-tumour treatments.

In her research poster Eva Slingerland proposes to develop an individualized model based on an MRI before the start of therapy and an MRI after 2-3 courses of therapy, that predicts how many courses of chemotherapy are needed to eradicate all tumour cells. With this research, she uses a spatiotemporal mechanically coupled reaction-diffusion model to model the number of tumour cells in each position of the breast, where the mechanics are included to simulate the behaviour of the surrounding tissue. For this patient-specific model, three MRI scans are used: the first two are used for calibration of the parameters and the third one is used for validation to compare the modelled result to the actual result. In the calculations, a finite difference scheme is used for the spatial discretization and forward Euler is used for the time discretization.

Currently, her research focuses on improving the model to incorporate the chemotherapy treatment schedule and to extend from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional model.

A large consortium of 30 European entities together launched the FLOW project, which aims to promote an electric mobility concept tailored to the end user, while benefiting the European energy system. The initiative will test, validate, and improve the so-called Vehicle-to-X technology, which will exchange energy between vehicles, buildings, and the grid. While the EU Parliament voted to ban new sales of fossil-fueled cars by 2035, FLOW will provide a solid foundation to accelerate the upcoming mass adoption of electric vehicle transportation.

TU Delft is one of the partners of the project, and has the role of developing of smart charging algorithms for V1G and V2G including grid congestion evaluation for mass deployment of electric vehicles. The team is led by Pavol Bauer and Gautham Ram. Together with their team they will build multi-criteria assessment tools that evaluates the effective of smart charging and V2G based on performance indicators such as emissions, grid impact, battery degradation, user convenience and charging cost.

Flow is funded under the Horizon Europe framework programme, with a total budget of about 10 million euros, and the project is led by IREC in Spain.

PhD student Merel Schalkers (DIAM) won not just one or two, but three prizes at the International Conference on Innovations for Community Services (I4CS). These were the Young Scientist Award, The Best Paper Award and the Best Presentation Award. The latter two prizes were awarded for her presentation and paper called ‘Learning Based Hardware-Centric Quantum Circuit Generation’ – exploring the possibilities of new forms of quantum computing.

In the paper and presentation she proposes an approach to find quantum circuits suitable to mimic probabilistic and search operations on a physical NISQ device. These possible solutions include both a gradient based and a non-gradient based machine learning approach to optimize the created quantum circuits. The optimization procedure her team proposes makes use of a cost function that differentiates between the vector representing the probabilities of measurement of each basis state after applying our learned circuit and the desired probability vector. As such the quantum circuit generation (QCG) approach leads to thinner quantum circuits which behave better when executed on physical quantum computers. It moreover ensures that the created quantum circuit obeys the restrictions of the chosen hardware.

At the IEEE European Test Symposium – Europe’s premier forum in the area of electronic-based circuits and system testing, reliability, security and validation – Moritz Fieback received the Best Paper Award.

Based on silicon measurements, he identified a new unique failure mechanism in emerging Resistive Random Access Memories (RRAMs). When this failure mechanism occurs, incorrect data is stored. Traditional test approaches fail to detect such a failure, as demonstrated by Moritz Fieback and his colleagues. Their research shows that a new way of testing called Device-Aware-Test is able to accurately model the failure mechanism and detect it. An improvement of RRAMs that did not go unnoticed! 

The Focused Ultrasound Personalized Therapy for the Treatment of Depression (UPSIDE) project proposal is selected for the EIC Pathfinder Challenge aimed at developing tools to measure and stimulate activity in brain tissue. The multi-disciplinary and international consortium is led by Dr. Tiago Costa, and includes Dr. Dante Muratore and Prof. Dr. Ir. Wouter Serdijn, as well as partners from Belgium, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and the USA.

With a total budget of 4.2 M€, the consortium will use the combined expertise in bioelectronics, brain-machine interfaces, focused ultrasound, neurobiology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry to achieve a technological breakthrough towards a personalized treatment for depression. Technology currently available still shows poor spatial resolution or low network coverage. Depression disappears in less than 30% of patients. Reliable biomarkers for depression are thus needed as diagnostic tools and to determine stimulation efficiency to enable personalized treatment. Therefore, UPSIDE will develop a brain interface for precise ultrasonic neuromodulation and reliable neural recording.

The Dutch Brain Interfaces Initiative (DBI2) receives a Gravitation grant of 21.9 million euros. Commissioned by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, NWO awards this grant to scientific consortia that have the potential to become world leaders within their field of research. The DBI2 consortium is led by Radboud University Nijmegen and Wouter Serdijn is one of TU Delft’s leaders for the research project.

His team aims to create a more thorough understanding of the way in which each part of the brain, from neuron to brain region, interacts with the rest of the brain and with the outside world. More specifically, they will use the Gravitation grant to develop principles, devices and methods to take these interactions into account and thus understand more about brain disorders, as well as moods, emotions and compulsions.
 

The National Growth Fund invests in 20 innovative research proposals. Oncode-PACT, a consortium aimed at accelerating the preclinical development process of cancer drugs, receives 325 million euros. Included in this consortium is Professor of Bioinformatics Marcel Reinders.

The consortium will use the funding to develop valuable candidate cancer drugs as well as new methods to get these new drugs to the patients for whom they are most effective. This will improve the quality of life of cancer patients while strengthening the future economic earning capacity of the Netherlands. 

An important role is reserved for the enabling power of Artificial Intelligence (AI). By deploying patient data and tissues from patients early in the development process – for example organoid technology and artificial intelligence – it is possible to assess whether a potential drug could be effective and safe much earlier in the process than is currently possible, and with greater certainty.

The NWO has awarded two Veni grants to promising young EEMCS researchers, Jochen Cremer and Sijun Du. Jochen Cremer will use his grant to research how AI can help to reduce power failures caused by the energy transition and the consequent far-reaching digitization of our energy grid. A key role will be to improve the understanding of physical laws by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Sijun Du will investigate solutions for improving the sustainability of the 'Internet of Things' (IoT) – which is making our environment increasingly digitized. By allowing chips to harvest energy from their environment, small IoT computer systems can become self-sufficient.

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The ‘Safe underground Hydrogen storage IN porous subsurface rEservoirs (SHINE)’ proposal is granted by the Innovative Training Networks (ITN) of the European Commission. The TU Delft receives funding for two PhD candidates, who will work under supervision of Prof.dr.ir Kees Vuik and Dr. Hadi Hajibeygi (as promotors) and Dr. Maartje Boon (as daily supervisor). 

Large-scale storage is vital for a successful hydrogen energy supply chain. Underground geological reservoirs, such as salt caverns and porous reservoirs, provide giant such storage spaces. However, they can be utilized for such usage only if we understand how hydrogen interacts with the reservoir fluids and rocks. A total of 10 PhD candidates will therefore study various aspects of underground hydrogen storage for this ITN project. 

The PhD candidates that will be hired by Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics (DIAM) will provide simulation and mathematical sciences relevant for underground hydrogen storage within our European Network. This is built on the successful cross-faculty collaboration between DIAM and Delft Advanced Reservoir Simulation (DARSim) group of Civil Engineering and Geosciencies (CEG).

Jeroen van Ammers receives the first prize at the 3 E - Royal SMIT BSc awards. Annually, these awards are presented to the best Bachelor of Science graduates in the field of Electrical Energy Engineering and Electricity Supply Engineering.

Together with Hsukang Chen, another Electrical Engineering student at TU Delft, Jeroen van Ammers worked on a battery management system for the Wireless Powerlizer. This powerbank enables wireless charging and has an integrated sterilizer that makes use of UV¬C light. Combining these features is useful, since regular disinfection of cellphones helps prevent transmission viruses. The battery management system for the Wireless Powerlizer comprises a charging circuit, a protection module, and cell balancing features. Its control system protects the battery from a number of failure modes and keeps the cell charge constant to keep the system as efficient as possible.

Jeroen van Ammers is awarded € 2.000 for his contribution to the annual Stichting 3 E competition.

ALIGN4energy receives a 4.9 million grant from the Dutch Research Council NWO. Within the consortium, Pedro Vergara Barrios (Intelligent Electrical Power Grids) will work on providing more intelligent input on heating, cooling and electricity in a future-proof energy system.

The ALIGN4energy consortium consists of scientists, businesses, municipalities, and NGO’s, dedicated to a quick and low-cost transformation to natural gas-free homes in the Netherlands. To help households and policymakers make energy-related investment decisions that are simultaneously optimal for each individual citizen and for the energy system, the consortium develops an adaptive digital decision-support system. This system provides them with information that is tailored to their situation, and citizens can use the platform to coordinate collective investments with their neighbors.

The grant that Vergara Barrios and his colleagues receive from NWO is part of the annual funding round for Research along Routes by Consortia. This financial instrument supports the Dutch Research Agenda, by promoting interdisciplinary research and innovations aimed at societal as well as scientific breakthroughs.

In the annual funding round for Research along Routes by Consortia, the Dutch Research Council NWO awards a 5.0 million euro grant to OBSeRVeD. Amongst the members of this consortium are EEMCS scientists Frans Widdershoven (Bioelectronics) and Sten Vollebregt (Electronic Components, Technology and Materials). They will be working on innovative sensors and machine-learning techniques for an electrical nose that can detect diseases in poultry.

In order to recognise certain diseases in an earlier stage, this sensitive system will match volatile organic compounds spread by chickens with the fingerprint of the disease. This would allow for more effective (preventive) measures, such as altering the feed, and thus reduce the use of antibiotics and chemicals. An important development for the welfare of chickens, the environmental impact of livestock farming, and our public health.

To look back in time, you need to look far, far away in the universe. Conventional techniques for this are limited: they either create a flat 2D image, or focus too much on the details. Neither paint a full picture of our universe, but that is about to change. Akira Endo has received an ERC Consolidator grant for his TIFUUN project, which will create 3D maps of vast volumes of the universe. These will cover both distant places and times – more than 10 billion years to be exact! The better imagery that Akira Endo will generate could revolutionize our insights into the history of galaxies, and the formation and evolution of the so-called ‘cosmic web’.

In the context of the Knowledge and Innovation Convenant, the Dutch Research Council awards funding to the Flexible Energy Communities (FlexECs) consortium. The TU Delft receives funding for one PhD, who will be supervised by Professor Pavol Bauer and Gautham Ram Chandra Mouli.

Energy communities are seen as one of the cornerstones of the sustainable energy transition. Yet, ECs’ success is limited by two main factors: grid capacity at distribution system level, and the ability and willingness of people, public and private entities to engage in joint activities in the energy sector by means of forming a community. FlexECs investigates whether mobile ECs, based on electrical vehicles, can address these limitations. In particular, electrical vehicles provide opportunities for energy transport outside the fixed grid, and broadening the range of communities that can form ECs. 

FlexECs is one of the four research projects that is awarded funding within the ‘Energy transition as a socio-technical challenge’. Jointly, they receive more than 7 million euros in funding. Societal and private partners will also contribute over 1.3 million euros in co-funding.

Whatever happens, there is always ‘noise’ – the random variations that confuse the bigger picture. It affects anything, from studying human impacts on climate change, through to the behaviour of countless consumers in the economy – there are always unexpected factors causing noise. Yet that noise is often missing in mathematical models of reality. With Mark Veraar's mathematical models this no longer needs to be the case – they help to incorporate noise into models to make them more realistic. He has now received a prestigious Vici grant, the largest grant of the Dutch NWO, which will help him to progress even further.

The NWO Domain Board Science has accepted 17 applications in the Open Competition Domain Science-M programme. Two of these fortunate scientists work at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science: Maksim Kitsak will do mathematical research into complementarity, by looking at the probability of individual parts of a network connecting. Frank Redig will research the mutual behaviour of particles in non-Euclidean space – for example proteins across a cell membrane.

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