A record ten early-stage TU/e researchers have been awarded a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The NWO Veni grants are dedicated to researchers who have finished their PhD research in recent years. This year - Marta Gil Pérez, Collin Drent, Alessandra Galli, Giulio D'Acunto, Samantha Fairchild, Rolf van Lieshout, Alexandra Lassota, Sebastien Callens, Paula Chanfreut, and Jacob Krüger each receive Veni funding worth up to 320,000 euros. This funding can be used to perform research over the next three years.
Marta Gil Pérez: FIBRAS - Fiber-wound Bio-composites for Resourceful Architectural Structures
FIBRAS - the Veni project of Marta Gil Pérez (Department of Built Environment) - explores the intersection of sustainable building materials and digital fabrication by developing fiber-wound bio-composites for resourceful architectural structures.
Robotic filament winding minimizes fabrication waste and optimizes fiber placement, offering an efficient and eco-friendly alternative to traditional construction. However, its implementation is challenged by variability in natural fiber properties and uncertainties in fabrication processes.
FIBRAS will employ experimental and computational methods to propose a design framework for scalable and reliable lightweight structures, such as beams or roof components, contributing to the reduction of CO₂ emissions in construction.
"My research aims to contribute to greener construction by cutting fabrication waste and CO₂ emissions, and by promoting renewable materials in architecture," says Gil Pérez.
Collin Drent: Optimization Models for Affordable Precision Medicine
Precision medicine tailors treatments to patients' genetic profiles, thereby revolutionizing care and significantly improving outcomes. However, it has also driven healthcare costs to unsustainable levels, threatening equitable healthcare access.
While advancements in biotechnology and genomics paved the way for precision medicine, critical gaps due to traditional clinical decision-making and payment schemes hinder its cost-effective adoption.
The Veni project of Collin Drent (Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences) proposes an interdisciplinary framework integrating Bayesian learning, stochastic optimization, and game theory to optimize precision medicine ecosystems from the perspectives of clinicians, industry, and policymakers. Drent's research will develop novel optimization models for personalized clinical decision-making and novel payment schemes, ensuring affordable precision medicine.
"This is a huge opportunity to develop new scientific tools that can help to tackle one of healthcare's biggest challenges: keeping life-saving personalized treatments affordable and accessible," says Drent.
Alessandra Galli: Non-invasive fetal brain monitoring through electrophysiological measures
For the Veni-funded project of Alessandra Galli (Department of Electrical Engineering), new methods will be developed to non-invasively monitor fetal brain health using signals acquired from the mother's abdomen. This approach is safer, more affordable, and suitable for frequent use, even in home settings.
Data from healthy and neurologically impaired fetuses will be collected to develop a model that predicts neurodevelopmental progress. Additionally, Galli's project will propose and validate an advanced method for the first non-invasive measurement of fetal brain activity.
These outcomes will pave the way for continuous fetal brain health monitoring, facilitating early diagnosis and intervention for neurological issues, and ultimately improving pregnancy outcomes worldwide.
"This is a milestone in my scientific journey and will help me to grow as an independent researcher," says Galli. "My research will push the boundaries of non-invasive fetal brain monitoring and help pave the way for continuous fetal brain monitoring."
Giulio D'Acunto: Shaping the future of electronics with light and plasma
Modern electronic devices rely on precise patterns at the nanoscale to function efficiently, which is driving the demand for smaller and more powerful components for our devices.
For his Veni project, Giulio D'Acunto (Department of Applied Physics and Science Education) will investigate how plasma and (extreme)ultraviolet treatments can modify surfaces to enable selective material deposition.
By exploring these processes at the atomic level, D'Acunto's project will develop new methods to create intricate patterns on materials such as traditional semiconductors (e.g., Si-based) and 2D transition metal dichalcogenides (2D-TMDs). These innovations will help shape the next generation of electronics while paving the way for more sustainable manufacturing processes.
"Getting this Veni grant has afforded me with an incredible opportunity to advance my independent research on surfaces and nanofabrication," says D'Acunto. "Work from this project will also help to promote sustainable manufacturing by reducing material waste in chip production and contribute to faster and greener electronics."
Samantha Fairchild: Crossing the transcendental divide
The heart of the Veni project of Samantha Fairchild (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science) is building a symbiotic relationship between the study of Riemann surfaces and algebraic curves, which are equivalent as mathematical objects but studied by two disparate fields of mathematics.
A major limitation to using this equivalence is the transcendental divide: explicitly moving between two representations requires transcendental functions, that is, functions which cannot be written as a polynomial.
This project proposes a novel method to cross the transcendental divide using recent advances in numerical algebraic geometry.
"As part of my work on this project, I will build research networks between two fields and connect young mathematicians with industry to address real-world challenges and improve career readiness," says Fairchild.
Rolf van Lieshout: Math for mobility - Designing public transport that serves society
Public transport operators rely on mathematical models for determining their routes, frequencies and timetables. However, existing models are largely focused on profit maximization, often overlooking the societal role of public transport-providing access to essential services.
For his Veni project, Rolf van Lieshout (Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences) will develop new mathematical optimization models that place this societal role at the center and explicitly maximize social welfare.
He will integrate economic theories on traveler behavior and social welfare concepts into optimization methods while also accounting for the strategic interactions between governments, transport operators, and travelers. Ultimately, this will lead to a public transport system that better serves society.
"Public transport plays a huge role in people's daily lives. I want to design systems that give people better access to mobility. That means rethinking how governments and transport operators plan services: not just focusing on profit or costs but looking at what's best for society as a whole," says van Lieshout.
Alexandra Lassota: Making the hard tractable - Exploring new parameters for integer programs
The Veni project of Alexandra Lassota (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science) targets one of the most crucial challenges in theoretical computer science and optimization: developing algorithms that efficiently solve integer programs (IPs).
While IPs are fundamental for solving large-scale, complex problems across society and industry by being the state-of-the-art approaches for many problems in operations research, their computational hardness remains the central challenge.
As applications often exhibit exploitable structures, Lassota's project pioneers in identifying new, efficiently solvable IP classes and designing algorithms to solve them. This adds to the knowledge of IPs and provides a stronger and more versatile toolkit, impacting many fields by redefining what problems are solvable.
"Designing efficient algorithms for integer programming-broadly used across various industrial and societal applications-will help, for instance, societal decision making and optimize resource usage," says Lassota. "The Veni grant will help me to grow as an independent researcher and to pursue bold new research ideas."
Sebastien Callens: Confined cartilage - Guiding growth for better joint repair
Damage to articular cartilage affects millions yet remains notoriously difficult to repair. This is because cartilage has a unique structural organization that current treatments fail to restore.
The Veni project of Sebastien Callens (Department of Biomedical Engineering) will combine stem cells, hydrogel materials, and advanced imaging techniques to study how this structural organization develops in tiny cartilage building blocks as they are guided to grow and fuse in specific directions.
"I want to better understand how the mechanical microenvironment controls cartilage growth and structural organization, and how to harness this in regenerative strategies," says Callens. "This funding is a major step in my academic career, and a powerful boost to continue developing my research line within orthopedic regeneration.
By better understanding and controlling this process, Callens' research will contribute to improved cartilage repair strategies, ultimately offering more effective and long-lasting solutions for patients with joint injuries.
Paula Chanfreut: Dynamic home energy management - optimizing for a sustainable future
Home energy management is not just essential for saving costs, but it's also an empowering tool to drive global sustainability through smart individual actions, such as scheduling appliance use and electric vehicle charging.
"The societal benefits of my project include environmental, economic, and grid-related dimensions through smart and collaborative energy management in homes and across neighborhoods," says Paula Chanfreut (Department of Mechanical Engineering). "I see the funding as both an encouragement and a responsibility. With it, I have a unique opportunity to grow as a researcher while contributing to energy sustainability."
For her Veni project, Chanfreut plans to leverage model predictive control (MPC) technology to dynamically optimize such actions, incorporating real-time data on energy generation, demands, prices, grid congestion, and users' preferences.
She will develop new MPC paradigms with potential within individual homes and across neighborhoods, where coordination can amplify benefits.
Her project will explore groundbreaking ideas in distributed MPC, paving the way for its integration into next-generation residential energy hubs.
Jacob Krüger: Conceptualizing human assumptions in software evolution (CHASE)
Software developers make assumptions to solve tasks for which they lack knowledge. Assumptions can be wrong and cause severe defects. Currently, there is no research on how developers make assumptions, how assumptions interplay with evolving software, and how to identify wrong assumptions during software evolution.
CHASE - the Veni project of Jacob Krüger (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science) - will pioneer research on these phenomena by identifying assumptions from developers' discussions and by conducting experiments to build the first theory on their interplay with software evolution.
The resulting theory will be a steppingstone for techniques that prevent wrong assumptions and will establish a novel research line in software engineering.
