(Image adapted from here.)Giovanni Volpe received the Faculty of Science’s 2023 Research Award for using methods from physics to look into complex and biological systems.
The Research Award of the Faculty of Science of the University of Gothenburg recognizes development of a research specialization that significantly contributes to novelty in the faculty’s research. The award recipient receives a diploma and a research grant of SEK 250,000. This year, the award ceremony will be held on 19 October.
The three award winners. From left to right: Mite Mijalkov, Harshith Bachimanchi, Marie Drouhin. (Photo by G. Volpe.)Harshith Bachimanchi won the best early career researcher presentation (gold) award at Emerging Topics in Artificial Intelligence (ETAI) 2023 held in San Diego, California, USA, from 20 – 24 August 2023. The award, consisting of an invitation to a part of a perspective article of AI in neurosciences, is offered by the organisers of the conference, and SPIE Optics + Photonics.
In this work, Harshith presented his recent work on combining holographic microscopy and deep learning to study the marine microplankton. He demonstrated that the combination of holographic microscopy and deep learning can be used to follow the marine microorganisms throughout their lifespan, continuously measuring their three-dimensional positions and dry mass. The deep-learning algorithms circumvent the computationally intensive processing of holographic data and allow rapid measurements over extended periods of time. This enables to reliably estimate growth rates, both in terms of dry mass increase and cell divisions, as well as to measure trophic interactions between species such as predation events. Studying individual interactions in idealized small systems provides insights that help us understand microbial food webs and ultimately larger-scale processes. He exemplified this by showing detailed descriptions of micro-zooplankton feeding events, cell divisions, and long-term monitoring of single cells from division to division.
Award certificate of Harshith Bachimanchi. (Provided by H. Bachimanchi.)Harshith Bachimanchi receives the award from Joana B. Pereira. (Photo by G. Volpe.)The three award winners. From left to right: Mite Mijalkov, Harshith Bachimanchi, Marie Drouhin. (Photo by G. Volpe.)
Jesús Pineda receives the Young Investigator Poster Award. (Photo by S. Masò Orriols.)Jesús Pineda was awarded the Young Investigator Poster Award on 30 June 2023 for its poster MAGIK: Microscopic motion analysis through graph inductive knowledge presented at the XVII International Congress of the Spanish Biophysical Society in Castedefells.
ECIS 2022 conference logo. (Image by ECIS 2022.)Marcel Rey won the prize for the best oral presentation at the European Colloid and Interface Society conference in Chania from 04.09.2022-09.09.2022. The award, consisting of 500 EUR, is offered by the affiliated MDPI open access journal of polymer science – Polymers.
In the talk, Marcel presented his recent work on the destabilisation mechanism of temperature-responsive emulsions. He demonstrated that the presence or absence of stimuli-responsive emulsion behaviour is linked to the characteristic microstructure of the stabilising microgel particles. Surprisingly, only emulsions where the microgels are in a double-corona morphology show stimuli-responsive behaviour while emulsions stabilised with microgels in a single-corona morphology remain insensitive to temperature.
In the event, held on Tuesday, 15 March 2022, 16:00-19:00, the ten teams that had gone through the training at the Startup Camp and developed their company ideas, pitched their companies on stage to a panel of entrepreneur experts, the other nine teams, and all business coaches at Chalmers Ventures. DeepTrack obtained the first place among the ten participants. Congrats!
Here a few pictures from the final pitching event of the Startup Camp.
Henrik. (Picture by Jonas Sandwall, Chalmers Ventures.) DeepTrack team members (left to right) Henrik, Giovanni and Jesus. (Picture by Jonas Sandwall, Chalmers Ventures.) Panelists. (Picture by Jonas Sandwall, Chalmers Ventures.)
The two complementary posters focused on the experimental and theoretical/numerical aspects of a system constituted by a micron-sized gold flake suspended in a solution of water-lutidine at critical concentration above a gold-coated substrate. The dynamic of such a system is driven by the interplay of Casimir-Lifshitz forces and critical Casimir forces, which, under convenient circumstances, are the keystone to prevent stiction.
The other two Poster Prizes were awarded to Ariane Soret ( University of Luxembourg, with the poster: Forces Induced by Quantum Mesoscopic Coherent Effects) and Fred Hucht (University of Duisburg-Essen, with the poster: The Square-Lattice Ising Model on the Rectangle).
The Poster Prizes recipients’ names were announced during the closing session on 17 February. Each prize consisted in 100 EUR, which in the case of Agnese and Falko will be shared equally between the two. Andrea Gambassi, who made the announcement on the behalf of the organizers, amusingly mentioned the custom of equally sharing the Nobel Prize.
The Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation is a private institution that supports scientific research and education with an emphasis on physics. It was established in 1963 by Dr. Wilhelm Heinrich Heraeus and his wife Else Heraeus. The Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation is Germany’s most important private institution funding physics.
The Soft Matter Lab is involved in six presentations at the OSA Biophotonic Congress: Optics in the Life Sciences 2021, topical meeting of Optical Manipulation and its Applications.
Moreover, three of the presentations were selected as finalists for the best student paper in the topical meeting of Optical Manipulation and its Applications.