Grants & Awards

Farbod Alijani, Associate Professor at the department of Precision and Microsystems Engineering, received an ERC Consolidator Grant. His ultimate goal is to improve the mechanical performance of 2D material sensors and use them for rapid screening tests in drug development and personalized medicine.

Jan-Willem van Wingerden, professor at the department Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC), along with his team and partners, devised ways of optimising the energy yield of entire wind farms using flow control. The logical progression for wind turbines that collectively reach their targets is to also hold those targets to a critical light. This is how the SUDOCO project application came about, which received the highest possible score and was awarded a grant from the European Commission.

The European Systems & Control PhD Award acknowledges excellence in the field of Systems and Control by recognizing the most outstanding PhD thesis and research conducted in Europe during the preceding year. This prestigious award is sponsored jointly by the European Control Association (EUCA) and the European Embedded Control Institute (EECI).

Bilge Atasoy, associate professor at the Department of Maritime & Transport Technology, has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to develop adaptive transport systems. She will work on a holistic adaptive modelling framework that considers the interactions between supply and demand to make transport more efficient, sustainable and user-centric.

Seventeen researchers from TU Delft, including 4 from the 3mE Faculty, namelyAimée Sakes, Sid Kumar, Cosimo Della Santina and Mathias Peirlinck, received a Veni grant. The funds will be used for a variety of research projects, from giving robots the intelligence to handle deformable objects to a catheter that ensures safer minimal invasive heart surgery.

A soft implantable robotic heart for people with severe heart failure. To develop this further, the Holland Hybrid Heart consortium has received 10 million euros from NWO. The soft robot heart can be implanted in the chest of patients with severe heart failure and takes over the function of the real heart. From TU Delft, assistant professor Mathias Peirlinck is involved. 

PlantXR, a CropXR research programme into 'smart breeding' of extra resilient crops receives 15 million euros from NWO. This marks the start of the new Dutch institute CropXR, which integrates plant biology, computational modelling, and artificial intelligence into 'smart breeding methods'.

TU Delft, together with partners, is involved in 10 of the 18 proposals honored by the National Growth Fund program. The government announced this on Friday, June 30. Researchers from 3mE are involved in 3 of these projects: Maritime Master Plan 2.0, Material Independence & Circular Batteries and Growing with Green Steel. 

Eight researchers from TU Delft, including three from the 3mE Faculty, namely Wouter Westerveld, Remco Hartkamp and Carlas Smith, received a Vidi grant for their research proposals.

Advanced robots are remarkable successful in conducting a specific task, yet only when operating in static and predictable environments. Unfortunately, the operability of existing robotics stalls catastrophically when significant or unpredictable events occur, as it breaks their closed world assumption. Babuska and colleagues propose the OpenBots project to turn robots from automated systems operating in a closed-world into autonomous systems that operate in the real, open world. 

Cosimo Della Santina received an Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation during the annual IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in London for his fundamental contributions to modeling, design, and control of soft and elastic robots.

Othon Moultos received a Young Researcher Award during the annual 16th International Conference on Properties and Phase Equilibria for Product and Process Design (PPEPPD2023) in Tarragona. This award is given to researchers younger than 40 years old who have initiated high impact contribution to Properties and Phase Equilibria for Product and Process Design.