Research News

Popular culture characters, such as superheroes like Iron Man, Captain America, Wonder Woman, Batman and Hawkeye, can provide a unique and engaging platform for the communication of difficult scientific concepts. In the classroom, these characters can be used to communicate learning objectives to students in an interesting, fun, and accessible manner by taking advantage of student familiarity with these superhero characters. Hawkeye, a member of the Avengers, is one such superhero who can be utilized by educators, as Barry Fitzgerald of Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, The Netherlands) argues in the article ‘Using Hawkeye from the Avengers to communicate on the eye’, published in the journal Advances in Physiology Education.

Paulien Herder, professor of energy systems at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management and chair of the Delft Energy Initiative, joined the Department of Process and Energy part time on 1 January 2018 in order to run the e-Refinery initiative. E-Refinery is a university-wide initiative of TU Delft that sees three faculties (AS, 3mE and TPM) joining forces in the field of the electrification of the chemical and energy sectors.

Early December TU Delft and Makerere University with funding from Nuffic implemented a tailor made training on “Innovation and Entrepreneurship to aid agricultural value chains”. The training lasted 2 weeks during which TU Delft trainers and participants discussed and identified challenges in doing entrepreneurship along agricultural value chains.

The Department of Biomechanical Engineering will be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2018. It’s still a relatively young department in a faculty that’s more than 150 years old, but nonetheless this is a moment well worth celebrating. How were the foundations of Biomechanical Engineering laid, one of the Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering (3mE) faculty’s seven departments at TU Delft? In order to highlight this anniversary, this story recounts some anecdotes from the past fifty years.

When the opportunity arose to set up a cohesion project, Burak Eral did not hesitate for a second. Burak Eral is a Tenure-Track lecturer at the Department of Process & Energy in the area of crystallisation & solids processing. He knew right away who he wanted to work with: Luigi Sasso, a Tenure-Track lecturer at the Department of Precision and Microsystems Engineering and an expert in the area of micro-manufacturing and sensors. A good match, as it turns out. Burak and Luigi have come up with a method to fight kidney stones.