Two new FOM programs honoured with AMOLF research

The executive committee of FOM has honoured five new national research programs.

 AMOLF is involved in two of those: the program Proton mobility in confinement, headed by program director Mischa Bonn, aims at elucidating the mobility of protons in complex and strongly confined media. Although much is known about the movement of protons in bulk water, the question is what happens when only few water molecules are available for proton transport, for instance in nano channels, and what is the influence of the nature of the pore surface on the transport process. In this program the AMOLF groups of Mischa Bonn and Huib Bakker work together with colleagues at the universities of Amsterdam and Leiden. Marileen Dogterom and Gijsje Koenderink take part in a second FOM program, led by Thomas Schmidt (UL), entitled 'Mechanosensing and mechanotransduction by cells'. They study how living cells can actively react to physical changes in their environment. They will study the role of the cytoskeleton and the cell-matrix adhesion on both a molecular and cellular level, by means of theory and experiment.