News
A block of rubber that counts to ten and even remembers in which sequence it was compressed. Physicists Martin van Hecke and Lennard Kwakernaak (Leiden and AMOLF Amsterdam) share a fascination for complexity in simple objects. They wrote an article about a counting block of rubber, which they classify as a metamaterial, and published it in the journal Physical Review Letters.
On June 22nd PhD student Hongy Sun successfully defended his thesis ‘Novel routes and insights into halide perovskite solar cells’. Sun carried out his doctoral research at AMOLF under supervision of Erik Garnett and Bruno Ehrler. The defense took place at the University of Amsterdam.
PhD student Mareike Berger successfully defended her thesis ‘Controlling DNA replication initiation: from living to synthetic cells’ at the Vrije Universiteit on May 3rd. Berger carried out her doctoral research in the group of Pieter Rein ten Wolde (Biochemical Networks). With her research Berger contributes to the research program BaSyC (Building a Synthetic Cell), which aims to create an autonomous, self-reproducing synthetic cell with a bottom-up approach.
A consortium consisting of AMOLF and other academic partners in the Netherlands receives funding from the NWO Research Infrastructure (RI) call for the project ‘Shining light on atomic-scale processes’ (SHINE). AMOLF’s group leader Wiebke Albrecht (Hybrid Nanosystems) is the principal investigator. The total budget for the duration of the project is 3 million euros.
AMOLF group leader and UvA professor Femius Koenderink has received funding from the NWO Domain Applied and Engineering Sciences for the OTP project entitled ‘Integrated nanophotonic and extreme-ultraviolet access to semiconductor metrology’ (NANOXUV). Koenderink is thrilled to start his research project together with Peter Kraus (ARCNL) and industrial partner ASML. NWO has assigned 1 million euro to the NANOXUV project.
On March 31st, 2023, the first OrganoidNL Symposium was organized at the AMOLF institute in Amsterdam. This one-day event brought together researchers from across the Netherlands with an interest in embryo-like structures and organoid technology and biology. With this symposium, the organizers aimed to further galvanize the already strong organoid research in the Netherlands by providing a platform for knowledge exchange and collaboration.
At the annual NWO Physics conference in Veldhoven, AMOLF has been awarded with the NNV Diversity Award. The NNV Diversity prize is awarded every two years by the Netherlands Physical Society to the physics institute that demonstrates the most successful implementation of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). AMOLF is proud to receive this award and sees the award as an encouragement to continue implementing its inclusion and diversity plans.
PhD student Jesse Slim received the qualification with honor (cum laude) for his PhD defense at Eindhoven University of Technology on March 9th. Slim did his doctoral research in the Photonic Forces group of his promotor Ewold Verhagen.
SolarNL is a national research, innovation and industrial investment program to bring back and stimulate photovoltaics manufacturing to the Netherlands/Europe. It has been submitted as a proposal for the National Economic Growth Fund (Nationaal Groeifonds) in February 2023. The consortium consists of a large group of public and private parties, one of which is AMOLF that contributes its expertise in fundamental photovoltaics research.
At the BLAST XVII conference 2023, AMOLF PhD student Fotios Avgidis has won the Howard C. Berg award for outstanding talk by a young investigator. Howard C. Berg was a pioneer in the field of biophysics.
AMOLF group leader Ewold Verhagen (Photonic Forces group) received an ERC Consolidator grant from the European Research Council (ERC). He has been granted 2.7 million euros to carry out his research plans. In addition to being an AMOLF group leader, Verhagen is part-time professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).
Researchers at AMOLF, University of Pennsylvania, and City University of New York (CUNY) created a nanostructured surface capable of solving equations using light. This discovery opens exciting new opportunities in the field of analog processing based on optical metasurfaces. AMOLF PhD student Andrea Cordaro and his co-authors publish their findings in Nature Nanotechnology on January 12th 2023.