The project proposal POLight (Pushing bOundaries of nanometrology by Light) coordinated by Omar El Gawhary has been selected for funding. The project, a collaboration among 15 partners in Europe, is expected to start in June 2021 and will receive 1.8M€ direct funding from the EU and around 1M€ of national funding from the different participating countries.

An international team of scientists that includes ImPhys researcher David Maresca published an article in Neuron today demonstrating decoding of movement intentions in the brain using ultrasound. The work shows great promises for the development of less invasive brain-machine interfaces.

Former ImPhys BEP student Dino Mocking has received a DIA stipend from the Germany Institute at the University of Amsterdam. With the stipend, Dino will continue his studies at the Technical University in Munich, Germany where he will follow the MSc Applied and Engineering Physics.

The Faculty of Applied Sciences has attracted four talented international researchers through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowships programme of the European Union. The new Fellows are: Anders Barth (Bionanoscience), Baptiste Heiles (Imaging Physics), Josep Ingla-Aynés (Quantum Nanoscience) and José Palomo Jiménez (Chemical Engineering).

Fatemeh Ebadi joined us a PhD student. She will work on automatic camera adjustments for live television under supervision of Bernd Rieger.

The Introduction to Charged Particle Optics course teaches students the basic principles and design considerations of electron and ion beam machines, such as microscopes and lithography machines. The elective course is already for a long time part of the TUD MSc program. Taking the opportunity of an online course, main instructor Ali Mohammadi Gheidari now decided to advertise the course also outside TU Delft, with great success. Interest in the course increased fourfold.

The project of Delphi Consortium, Cyprus Institute (CI) and eight European partners has been granted. They will receive funding for two PhD students for their project: “Enabling the next generation of computational physicists and engineers (ENGAGE)”.

The Maresca Lab introduces the nascent field of biomolecular ultrasound imaging, a molecular imaging approach that relies on genetically encoded acoustic biomolecules to interface ultrasound waves with cellular processes. They review ultrasound imaging applications bridging wave physics and chemical engineering with potential for deep brain imaging.

The Delphi Consortium is a collaboration between Applied Sciences and Civil Engineering & Geosciences and is sponsored by ~25 companies, traditionally from the oil & gas industry. Because of the increasing awareness of the negative impact of fossil fuels on the environment, it was decided to shift the focus to applications in the sustainable geo-energy sector. In January Delphi welcomed Fugro as a new sponsor. Fugro's interest is in near-surface characterization for constructions (offshore wind turbines).

From the 1st of March, Hylkje Geertsema started her tenure-track position within Imphys. Her position has a large focus on education and educational innovation in applied physics and nanobiology. At the same time, she will direct a small research group pursuing quantitative super-resolution microscopy on DNA replication proteins in human cells.