Prize – Page 2 – Soft Matter Lab

Laura Pérez García nominated for a Student Paper Prize at the Biophotonics Congress

FORMA allows to identify and characterize all the equilibrium points in a force field generated by a speckle pattern

Laura Pérez García has been nominated by the Optical Society of America for a Student Paper Prize for Optical Manipulation and its Applications among three other finalists. She will present her work on FORMA and BEFORE: Expanding Applications of Optical Tweezers at the Optical Manipulation and its Applications meeting as part of the 2021 OSA Biophotonics Congress: Optics in Life Sciences.

The final selection will be based on the oral talk and Laura will present her work on the 15th of April at 15:45 (CEST).

Falko Schmidt nominated for a Student Paper Prize at the Biophotonics Congress

Non-spherical nanoparticle held by optical tweezers. The particle is trapped against the cover slide.

Falko Schmidt has been nominated by the Optical Society of America for a Student Paper Prize for Optical Manipulation and its Applications among three other finalists. He will present his work on the Dynamics of an Active Nanoparticle in an Optical Trap at the Optical Manipulation and its Applications meeting as part of the 2021 OSA Biophotonics Congress: Optics in Life Sciences.

Based on the oral presentations of the finalists, the jury will select the winner. Falko Schmidt will present on April 16th at 12:30pm (CEST).

This work is based on the article recently published in Nature Communications.

Non-equilibrium properties of an active nanoparticle in a harmonic potential
Falko Schmidt, Hana Šípová-Jungová, Mikael Käll, Alois Würger & Giovanni Volpe
Nature Communications 12, 1902 (2021)
doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-22187-z
arXiv: 2009.08393

David Bronte Ciriza nominated for a Student Paper Prize at the Biophotonics Congress

Optical forces calculated on a sphere with the geometrical optics (left column) and the machine learning (center column) approaches. The difference between both approaches is shown in the column on the right, illustrating the removal of artefacts with the machine learning method.

David Bronte Ciriza has been nominated by the Optical Society of America for a Student Paper Prize for Optical Manipulation and its Applications among three other finalists. He will present his work on Machine Learning to Enhance the Calculation of Optical Forces in the Geometrical Optics Approximation at the Optical Manipulation and its Applications meeting as part of the 2021 OSA Biophotonics Congress: Optics in Life Sciences.

Based on the oral presentations of the finalists, the jury will select the winner. David Bronte Ciriza will present on April 16th at 5:00pm (CEST).

Giovanni Volpe awarded new ERC Consolidator Grant

Giovanni Volpe has been awarded a new European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant on Wednesday, December 9th 2020.

The title of his project is “Microscopic Active Particles with Embodied Intelligence”.

Active particles and active matter research tries to understand and replicate the characteristics of living microorganisms in artificial systems. Over billions of years of evolution, living organisms have developed complex strategies to survive and thrive. The artificial active particles are still incapable of autonomous information processing.

Giovanni Volpe’s project aims to address three main challenges in the current research on active matter:

Make active particles capable of autonomous information processing.
Optimize the behavioral strategies of individual active particles.
Optimize the interactions between active particles.

Links
Giovanni Volpe awarded new ERC Consolidator Grant
Official press release (ERC): CoG Recipients 2020
14 forskare verksamma i Sverige får ERC Consolidator grant

Aykut Argun’s team wins in four categories of the ANDI challenge

Aykut Argun (Soft Matter Lab) and Stefano Bo (MPI Dresden) participated in the AnDi Challenge, the Anomalous Diffusion challenge, in all the nine categories.

The challenge consisted of different tasks, specifically:

Task 1 – Inference of the anomalous diffusion exponent α.
Task 2 – Classification of the diffusion model.
Task 3 – Segmentation of trajectories.

Each task included modalities for different number of dimensions (1D, 2D and 3D), for a total of 9 subtasks.

Approximately 20 teams from all the world participated in the challenge.

Aykut’s and Stefano’s team, eduN, ranked in the first three positions in all the categories. EduN won the 1st place in 4 of the categories, i.e., Task 2 (1D and 2D), and Task 3 (1D and 3D), the 2nd place in another 4 categories, and 3rd in the remaining category.

The details and the information about the final results can be found on ANDI Challenge final results page: http://www.andi-challenge.org/ (select: Learn the Details and then Final Results)

Here the link to the video of the announcement.

Giovanni Volpe awarded with the ERC Proof of Concept Grant

Giovanni Volpe has been awarded with the ERC Proof of Concept Grant for the research project LUCERO: Smart Optofluidic micromanipulation of Biological Samples.

The grant, consisting of 150k EUR, is meant to commercialize the research project LUCERO, providing an innovative method that combines artificial intelligence and optical tweezers to analyze cells easily and inexpensively.

The current technologies for cell analysis have many limitations: they require access to a large number of cells and considerable expertise. The available methods are also labor-intensive and in some cases the cells are destroyed.

The new method developed in LUCERO simplifies the work and lowers the costs of biomedical research by allowing ordinary standard microscopes, which are already in use in biomedical laboratories, to be used to perform the cell analysis.

The method of LUCERO can be used in several areas, from artificial insemination to forensic medicine. It has potentially a large commercial market.

Giovanni Volpe expects that LUCERO will provide around 20 jobs for university-trained experts and researchers within the next five years.

The project LUCERO has already received initial funding and support from two different organizations (Venture Cup and SPIE). Two doctoral students, Falko Schmidt and Martin B. Mojica, are part of LUCERO’s contributors team.

Links:
Press release of the Swedish Research Council: in English, in Swedish.
News on Gothenburg University website: in Swedish.

Start-up “Lucero” Semi-finalist in SPIE Startup Challenge

Our idea Lucero, has reached the semi-final for the SPIE Start-up challenge, where will pitch in front of a jury at Photonics West in San Francisco, CA, USA on the 4th of February 2020.

Lucero will compete, among other 41 semifinalists, for cash prizes and business support.

In addition, Lucero was awarded one of the three Early Stage Entrepreneurship Travel Grants to attend the semi-final.

The start-up is aiming to make cutting-edge laser technology easy to use and available to anyone by combining it with commercial microscope. The product and software combo utilizes optical tweezers in a brand-new way – and bridges the gap between physics and other scientific fields that would greatly benefit from easier access to this tool.

In December, Lucero was ranked among the best 5 business ideas in West Sweden.

Team components: Christopher Jacklin, Rich Zapata Rosas, Felix Mossberg, Falko Schmidt, Alejandro Diaz Tormo and Martin Mojica-Benavides.

Links: Lucero Homepage

Start-up “Lucero Bio” among the best 5 business ideas in West Sweden

Falko Schmidt and other researchers at the University of Gothenburg, in collaboration with Business students at the Chalmers School of Entrepreneurship, have received early acclaimfor their Start-up idea “Lucero Bio”.

Lucero Bio was ranked among one of the top 5 business ideas in West Sweden by Venture Cup Sweden. Out of the 376 ideas that were submitted to the competition, nearly half came from the western region of Sweden.

Team components: Christopher Jacklin, Rich Zapata Rosas, Felix Mossberg, Falko Schmidt, Alejandro Diaz Tormo and Martin Mojica-Benavides.

More information:
Press release, in Swedish.
Top 20 list of the 2019 winners, in Swedish.

Alessandro Magazzù awarded Best Presentation Prize at Soft Matter Days 2018

Alessandro Magazzù has been awarded a best oral contribution “Soft Matter poster price” during the conference Italian Soft Matter Days 2018, held in Padua, Italy on September 13-14, 2018. The prize has been given by Emanuela Zaccarelli, editorial board members of the Soft Matter journal. This prize mainly consists in an invitation to submit a manuscript without the pre-screening by the Editors. It also includes a “poster prize” and a personal yearly subscription to the journal.