Prize – Soft Matter Lab

Harshith Bachimanchi won best early-career researcher presentation award at AIM 2024, La Ràpita, Spain

Committee and winners for the IOP award at AIM24. From left to right: Susan Cox, Wylie Ahmed, Celia Rowland (IOP), Harshith Bachimanchi, Blanca Zufiria Gerboles, Mirja Granfors, Carlotta Viana, Gajendra Pratap Singh, Giorgio Volpe. *(Photo by G. Volpe)*

Harshith Bachimanchi won the best early career researcher presentation award at AIM 2024 meeting (Artificial Intelligence for iMaging 2024) held in La Ràpita, Spain, from 26 May – 1 June 2024.

The award, consisting of a certificate, and a cash prize of 500 €, is sponsored by Journal of Physics: Photonics (JPhys Photonics) from IOP Publishing.

Harshith received the prize for his presentation on “Bringing microplankton to focus: Holography and deep learning”, where 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. 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.

The article related to this presentation can be found at the following link: Microplankton life histories revealed by holographic microscopy and deep learning.

Award Certificate. *(Image by H. Bachimanchi)*

Harshith Bachimanchi receives the prize. *(Photo by A. Callegari)*

Mirja Granfors won best early-career researcher presentation award at AIM 2024, La Ràpita, Spain

Mirja Granfors won the best early career researcher presentation award at AIM 2024 meeting (Artificial Intelligence for iMaging 2024) held in La Ràpita, Spain, from 26 May – 1 June 2024.

The award, consisting of a certificate, and a cash prize of 250 €, is sponsored by Nanophotonics.

Mirja was awarded the prize for her presentation titled “Global graph features unveiled by unsupervised geometric deep learning”. In her presentation, she introduced a novel graph autoencoder designed to capture complex relationships modelled by graphs. She demonstrated the performance of the network across a spectrum of datasets, including the classification of protein assembly structures from single-molecule localization microscopy data, as well as the analysis of collective behavior and correlations between brain connections and age.

Award Certificate. *(Image by M. Granfors)*

Mirja presents at AIM24 Conference. *(Photo by N. C. Palmero Crúz)*

Giovanni Volpe awarded the Göran Gustafsson prize

Giovanni Volpe was awarded one of Sweden’s most prestigious prizes for physics, the Göran Gustafsson Prize, which is handed out by the Göran Gustafsson Foundation with the help of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Giovanni receives the physics prize “for boundary breaking research focusing on microscopic particles with active functions”. The prize sum is 6.3 million SEK.

More details here:
Press release of Gothenburg University: Giovanni Volpe receives prestigious Göran Gustafsson prize
Press release of Kungl. Vetenskapsakademien: 33 miljoner till forskning om bland annat TBE och smarta mikropartiklar

Y.-W. Chang received the Gun and Bertil Stohnes Foundation Prize for PhD students

Logo of the Gun and Bertil Stohne’s Foundation. *(Image from the Foundation’s website.)*

Yu-Wei Chang received one of the Gun and Bertil Stohnes Foundation Prizes for PhD students, with his recent research focusing on deep learning analysis of longitudinal tau pathology. The price consists in 100000 SEK given to one – or shared between two – student(s) at a Swedish university.

The Gun and Bertil Stohnes Foundation awards this prize to research projects in geriatrics that the Board deems of exceptional interest and value.

Anna Canal Garcia, from Karolinska Institutet and supervised by Prof. Joana B. Pereira, is the other recipient of this award. Anna’s research focuses on the intricate multilayer network analysis of brain neuroimaging data.

Giovanni Volpe awarded the Faculty of Science’s 2023 Research Award

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.

A short interview with Giovanni Volpe regarding this achievement can be found at the link: Giovanni Volpe awarded the Faculty of Science’s 2023 Research Award.

Harshith Bachimanchi won best early career researcher presentation award at ETAI 2023, San Diego

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.

The article related to this presentation can be found at the following link: Microplankton life histories revealed by holographic microscopy and deep learning.

Award certificate of Harshith Bachimanchi. *(Provided by H. Bachimanchi.)*

Harshith Bachimanchi receives the award from Joana B. Pereira. *(Photo by G. Volpe.)*

J. Pineda was awarded the Young Investigator Poster Award at the XVII International Congress of the Spanish Biophysical Society, Castelldefels, 30 Jun 2023

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.

Here the link to the poster.

Marcel Rey won best oral presentation at ECIS, Chania

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.

DeepTrack won the pitching competition at the Startup Camp 2022. Congrats!

DeepTrack team members (left to right) Henrik, Giovanni and Jesus. *(Picture by Jonas Sandwall, Chalmers Ventures.)*

The DeepTrack team, composed by Henrik Klein Moberg, Jesus Pineda, Benjamin Midtvedt and Giovanni Volpe, won the pitching competition at the Startup Camp 2022 organised by Chalmers Ventures.

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.)*

Panelists. *(Picture by Jonas Sandwall, Chalmers Ventures.)*

Featured in:
University of Gothenburg – News and Events: AI tool that analyses microscope images won startup competition and AI-verktyg som analyserar mikroskopbilder vann startup-tävling
(Swedish)

A. Callegari and F. Schmidt won the Poster Prize at the 729. WE Heraeus Seminar on Fluctuation-induced Forces

Gold flake suspended over a functionalized gold-coated substrate. (Image by F. Schmidt.)

Agnese Callegari and Falko Schmidt share one of the three Poster Prizes of the 729. WE-Heraeus-Seminare on Fluctuation-induced Forces.

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.