The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded an ENW-M grant to dr. Matz Liebel of the Biophotonics & Medical Imaging Group for his project Table to Farm: turnkey SERS for real-life applications.
Analytical techniques play a crucial role in our daily lives, aiding medical diagnostics, ensuring clean food, water, and safe travel. The design of analytical platforms involves balancing specificity, precision, sensitivity, speed, and cost. Surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) assays have the potential for sophisticated, low-cost analysis, but current read-out platforms are slow, complex and very expensive, limiting their widespread use. FASTSERS offers a solution: an affordable, easy-to-use widefield SERS reader that maximizes SERS capabilities. Additionally, user-friendly SERS-sensing and barcoding assays will be developed, expanding the analytical potential of SERS beyond academic applications.
NWO Open Competition Domain Science (ENW)
NWO has awarded a total of 19 grants within the Open Competition of the NWO Domain Science (ENW). M-grants are intended for realising curiosity-driven, fundamental research of high quality and/or scientific urgency. The M-grant offers researchers the possibility to elaborate creative and risky ideas and to realise scientific innovations that can form the basis for the research themes of the future. There are three categories of M-grants: M-1 (one scientific position), M-2 (two scientific positions in collaboration) and M-invest (investments) that are assessed in competition with each other.