Biophysicist Volha Chukhutsina, from Biophysics of Photosynthesis at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been awarded a prestigious XS grant from the Open Competition Domain Science – XS of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
The XS grants are designed to support groundbreaking, high-risk research across the seven Domain Science disciplines. Each selected project receives up to €50,000 to explore promising and speculative scientific ideas that can push the boundaries of current knowledge.
Dr. Chukhutsina’s awarded project, titled “SF-TA: Towards Scattering-Free Measurements in Transient Absorption Spectroscopy,” aims to tackle a long-standing limitation in the field of optical spectroscopy. While transient absorption spectroscopy (TA) is a key method for studying ultrafast photophysical and photochemical processes, it has limited application on highly scattering biological samples such as plant leaves, intact algae, or protein crystals. Chukhutsina’s project seeks to develop a scatter-free TA setup (SF-TA) that enables accurate in vivo measurements on these complex samples—opening new possibilities for research in photobiology and photosynthesis.