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Demand for affordable biopharmaceuticals such as vaccines and cancer drugs is steadily increasing. Researchers from the Department of Biotechnology at TU Delft's Faculty of Applied Sciences are now set to join forces with pharmaceutical company Janssen to develop a solution. The official project launch took place on 16 June 2023. The aim of the project is to replace manual operations in order to design automated, continuous biotech processes with higher yields.

Cees Haringa of our faculty was awarded with a Comenius grant by National Regieorgaan Onderwijsonderzoek (NRO). Since 2017, more than 200 education professionals have received a Comenius grant. With this grant they can put their vision on educational innovation into practice. Cees is awarded for the project ‘More than just modelling and programming: educating engineers that excel in a digital workspace and society’.

In dit project zullen TU Delft, Physee en NSG-Pilkington een kosteneffectief energieopwekkend luminescerende coating voor ramen ontwikkelen op basis van het principe van een luminescente zonneconcentrator. Dit zal worden bereikt met nieuwe luminescerende materialen die uniform over het gehele zichtbare zonnespectrum kunnen absorberen, de geabsorbeerde energie opnieuw kunnen emitteren en transporteren naar zonnecellen.

On Saturday 3 June 2023, 276 participants took part in the attempt to set the Guinness World Records pipetting, organised by Nanobiology students from Delft University of Technology and Erasmus MC. Within only 5 minutes the volunteers managed to simultaneously suck up and displace fluids with a pipette.

Disentangling the complex nerve fibre network of the brain is becoming easily accessible with scattered light imaging (SLI): researchers in Delft, Jülich (Germany) and Stanford (USA) successfully combined light and X-ray scattering with MRI to discern nerve fibre trajectories, also in regions with highly entangled fibres. SLI revealed the trajectories at highest detail, while being significantly faster and cheaper than X-ray and MRI techniques. Such detailed mapping is essential for a better understanding of how nerve fibres are wired inside the brain.

The Domain Board Science of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded 28 applications in the Open Competition Domain Science - XS. One of the honoured applications is from Aswin Muralidharan for project ‘Using bacterial defense machinery for selective killing of cancer cells’. Aswin Muralidharan is a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Stan Brouns (Department of Bionanoscience). Muralidharan’s current research interest lies in interactions of bacteria and bacteriophages.

In April 2023, Minister of Education, Culture and Science Robbert Dijkgraaf officially opened the renovated Electron Microscopy Centre (EMC) in Utrecht. In what used to be a somewhat disjointed field of science, the EMC provides a hub where researchers from all the relevant disciplines have access to the expensive equipment for electron microscopy. This significant development is the result of the intensive efforts of the Perspectief consortium Microscopy Valley, with Delft University of Technology as one of the parties.

TU Delft’s Executive Board has appointed Wim Koppers as Director of the TU Delft Reactor Institute with effect from 1 September 2023.

On Thursday 11 May, Delft University Fund organised the 2023 Marina van Damme Grant Award Ceremony. Three female Delft alumni stood the chance to win the coveted grant of €9,000. After three impressive pitches and a short jury meeting, Prof. Marina van Geenhuizen, chair of the jury, announced that it was a "roaring" 20th edition with a surprising result: both Mei Ling Tan and Oleksandra Ivashchenko were declared winners of the Marina van Damme Grant 2023.