Science

Hoe veel informatie past in een foton?

Het begon met een fundamentele vraag voor MESA+-onderzoekers: hoe veel informatie kun je in één minuscuul lichtdeeltje (foton) stoppen? Meer dan 10 bit, bleek uit hun onderzoek, dat ze publiceerden in het wetenschappelijke tijdschrift Optics Express.
Science

We feel less pain when distracted

Are you in pain? Don’t pay attention to it! That might sound like a strange advice, but there is truth to it. In his PhD research, Jorian Blom has shown that attention truly affects pain. ‘If attention is completely redirected away from the pain stimuli, people perceive less pain,’ explains the soon-to-be UT graduate.
Science

‘Each tree is valuable’

‘Water shortage is a big issue in Iran, which is why it is important to make the optimal decisions regarding water allocation - to every single tree,’ Milad Mahour explains why he developed a method able to detect individual trees using satellite images.
Science

Digital nature helping patients to recover

Nature has been proven to facilitate patients’ recovery and to improve general well-being of people who spend a lot of time indoors. Yet not everyone has the opportunity to go into nature, so the question is: how do you provide access to nature if nature simply is not around? Researchers from the University of Twente have decided to digitalize it.
Science

Gravity plays a game with fluid scientists

For several decades, scientists have used tiny particles and bubbles to study the turbulence in liquid flows. And all that time researchers have expected these tiny objects to trace the flows accurately. But this may not be the case.
PhD

Combining management with neuroscience

What do cognitive neuroscience and social entrepreneurship have in common? At the very least, they are both important parts of Raja Singaram’s PhD research. ‘How to support social entrepreneurs that start new business ventures?’ That was the question Singaram asked himself before moving from Silicon Valley to the University of Twente.
PhD

Mapping the reality of slums

Born in the USA, studies in the Netherlands, work in Bolivia, Master’s degree in Spain and Sweden... and now a PhD position at ITC. That is Caroline Gevaert’s life in a nutshell. The research of this cosmopolitan PhD candidate is focused on mapping informal settlements with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). ‘I can’t believe it’s my job,' she says about flying drones in Africa.
PhD

Robots to inspect dikes

Dikes protect a large part of the Netherlands from flooding. If they fail, many people will suddenly live literally below sea level. ‘If there are problems with dikes, there are severe consequences. We are trying to solve that from the robotic perspective’, says Douwe Dresscher, who is helping to develop a robot that could autonomously inspect dikes.
PhD

BE COOL! Design moon houses

Gifted pupils in primary schools mostly read textbooks or work on individual assignments. But not children participating in BE COOL!-project. Those students get to design moon houses. The project introduces a new type of learning method built on collaboration and Alieke van Dijk is there to design and research this new educational approach.
PhD

Detecting cancer from urine

His aspiration was to save lives, and so he decided to switch from engineering to nanotechnology. The place to do that was the UT, where Dilu George Mathew now works on ‘Early Stage Cancer Detection Sensor’, a device able to detect cancer from patients’ urine. ‘This technique could not only save lives, but also a lot of money.’
PhD

Treatment of type 1 diabetes

It all started with a simple optical microscope she got as a child and used to examine the structure of paper or leaves. Now she is working on developing abioactive scaffoldto treat type 1 diabetes. ‘I love chocolate, it adds sweetness to life and I want everybody to be able to enjoy it!’ says Elahe Hadavi, PhD candidate from the Developmental BioEngineering group.
PhD

Analysing groundwater in Botswana

Water is essential to all life on Earth, but some areas have fewer water supplies than others. ‘We need to know what resources there are, in order to use them efficiently,’ says Moiteela Lekula, who is researching groundwater storage in his home country of Botswana.
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