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On 26 April 2022, Professor Paulien Herder, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences, was awarded a Royal distinction in the municipality of Pijnacker-Nootdorp. Paulien Herder was appointed a Knight in the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands, an award given to persons who have made an exceptional contribution to Dutch society.

One of the big societal challenges today, is that the chemical industry still consumes a considerable amount of energy and resources. “This is a global issue for most, if not all, chemicals that factories produce nowadays”, says researcher Frank Hollmann. He has received a 2.5 M€ ERC Advanced Grant from the European Union to help tackle this problem over the next five years, by engineering enzymes as a catalyst for chemical reactions.

Making detailed 3D images of proteins in living cells with a special light microscope, without damaging those cells. That is what Sjoerd Stallinga, winner of an ERC Advanced grant worth 2.3 million euros, wants to achieve. In order to do so he is going to scan samples nanometer by nanometer using a sophisticated 3D light pattern in an approach that requires extensive collaboration between different disciplines.

A of researchers from TU Delft , led by dr. Farbod Alijani, have managed to capture low-level noise of a single bacterium using graphene. Now, their research is published in Nature Nanotechnology.

The National Growth Fund of the Dutch government grants conditional funding of 60 million euros to the Cellular Agriculture consortium, whose goal is to produce and promote protein-rich food from cultivated cells. The TU Delft is one of the founders of the consortium, with Marcel Ottens as initiator of the line of research. The TU Delft, together with the companies PlanetBio, DSM, Meatable, CE Delft and others, forms a hub in Delft for this new field of work.

Jochem Vink (Bionanoscience) has received a Rubicon grant from NWO, which enables him to gain research experience at a leading institute abroad. His research will be about useful fungi attracting pathogens. He was awarded the coveted grant along with 21 other researchers who recently received their PhDs.

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded a Veni grant to researcher Robin de Kruijff of the Reactor Institute Delft (RID) for her research on a new type of radionuclide generator which, among other things, can obviate the global bottleneck in cancer research. The new generator will, moreover, be the first recyclable one of its kind. “I hope that my new type of generator will ultimately make diagnostic treatments much more accessible and less dependent on a handful of reactors”, says De Kruijff.

Another 78 promising young scientists receive Veni funding of up to 280,000 euros from NWO. This concerns sixty researchers from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SGW) domain and eighteen from the Applied and Technical Sciences (TTW) domain, who can further develop their own research ideas over the next three years. The Venis for the ENW and ZonMW domains were announced in December 2021.

Oil and gas shortages are not only pushing up the prices of gas and petrol, but also plastics, medicines and cosmetics. To make our society less dependent on fossil fuels and combat climate change, the chemical industry needs to change radically. In recent years, TU Delft and TNO have laid the foundation for cleaner production processes in the chemical industry. The new e-Chem partnership is now taking this a step further by actually constructing a clean factory of the future.