Universiteitsfonds Delft

Whether it’s testing water quality, test-driving autonomous vehicles or mapping plastic pollution: TU Delft regularly enlists the help of citizens in its research.

Sandra de Vries sees citizen science as a great way of sparking people’s enthusiasm for science. “On the water quality project, we achieved a lot of results with little effort.”

👉 Read the full story: https://bit.ly/44Kgmlj

📸 Sam Rentmeester

Connect! Vorige week tijdens Graduate Connect kwam de hele community van het Graduate Entrepreneur bij elkaar: donateurs, investeerders, coaches, startups en de organisatie achter Graduate.

Centraal stond de connectie met elkaar, zowel op het podium als in het onderlinge contact. Philip Hess leerde de coaches van Graduate hoe ze een betere coach kunnen worden en Jurriaan Graaff vertelde de founders meer over het aannemen van nieuw personeel in hun beginnende bedrijf. Ludolf Stavenga ging in gesprek met Crijn Bouman over het opzetten van een succesvolle startup en Arjanneke Teeuw werd geïnterviewd op het podium. Coaches Merlin de Graaf en Ruben Verkuijl deelden hun eigen ervaringen met coaching toen zij startende ondernemers waren en wat het hen bracht.

Tijdens de startup markt ging iedereen met elkaar in gesprek om ervaringen uit te wisselen. Alle aanwezigen liepen YESDelft uit met nieuwe connecties. Dat is de reden dat we donateurs, investeerders en startups samenbrengen: om samen een impactvolle community op te bouwen!

Het Graduate Entrepreneur Fund is een deelfonds van het Universiteitsfonds Delft en het Erasmus Trustfonds. Ook onderdeel worden van deze ondernemende community? Neem dan contact op met ons of lees hier meer: https://www.tudelft.nl/universiteitsfonds/help-mee/graduate-entrepreneur-fund

It was a great pleasure to welcome donors, Good Friends, Founders of the Excellence Fund, and alumni volunteers in real life at the Taste of Excellence Diner 2022, yesterday evening.

Together, we celebrated what the community achieved. The TU Delft alumni community and its friends are growing and are still very committed to making the university better every year. Together with them, we support TU Delft's mission to create an impact for a better society.

Congratulations Saskia van Heumen on becoming TU Delft 2022!

Her research into using in brought the medical world a step further. Saskia literally started with an empty lab and concluded with a rich patient data set acquired in an innovative imaging study. This rich data set enabled her to do precision surgery that will restore full functionality in life for severe lymphedema patients. This ground-breaking work will positively impact the lives of many women who suffer from .

According to professor Robert Mudde, Vice Rector Magnificus/Vice President Education, and Chairman TU Delft Best Graduate Jury, “Saskia’s work is a wonderful example of the contribution clinical technicians can make to improve patient outcomes. It is convergence in practice, and it also really embodies our mission of creating impact for a better society.”

“Winning the Award is the cherry on the cake. Considering all the great Best Graduate nominees, I didn’t expect to win at all. Without the support of my friends and family, I couldn’t have done it.”

Read more: https://www.tudelft.nl/en/2022/university-fund/saskia-van-heumen-tu-delft-best-graduate-2022

TU Delft - Mechanical Engineering Erasmus MC

Economies are continuously changing. Decades ago many industrial towns were built and focussed on the natural resources that were around, providing locals with the opportunity to work in that specific section of the industry. The industry evolves, and today the focus is often being replaced by a sustainable one, making these specific locations less relevant. are being dilapidated, so how can we provide these places with a future vision? Jacopo Zani came up with a unique vision for the redevelopment of the dilapidated mining town of in the Belgian municipality of . His vision revolves around social cohesion and space for nature, giving architects a new role. For this, he earned the title of 2022 of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment TU Delft.

Waterschei’s mines closed in 1987 as they were not profitable enough. In the decades thereafter the city became impoverished and many residents left Waterschei. What remained is a desolate, decaying town with no identity and little social cohesion. “I wondered if it would be possible to revive the abandoned and decaying town of Waterschei without that dependency on one economic activity,” says Jacopo. In his project, Jacopo focused on architectural modifications that would improve the quality of life. He emphasized that redevelopment will only be successful if there is a continuous dialogue with the local community about the aspects that they want to retain and transform, and what we leave to nature. He also sees a new role for architects.

“I really believe that architects should take their social responsibility and enter into dialogue with residents, clients and construction partners. They should jointly look for solutions that go further than the usual economic considerations, such as cost efficiency and profits.” Read more of Jacopo’s work on the architect as a social connector here: https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/the-architect-as-a-social-connector

We are launching more and more satellites into our skies. The risk of collision between has largely increased in recent years, becoming a considerable threat to and human spaceflight. How can we make sure that we can accurately compute these risks, and make sure that future space activities can be done safely? Mireia Leon Dasi dived into that matter and developed a method to compute for any type of space encounter with high accuracy. For this, she earned the title of of the TU Delft Aerospace Engineering.

Chair of the Astrodynamics and Space Missions Dr Pieter Visser was very excited. He said that “Due to the literally uncertain nature of the problem, satellite operators need to take large margins into account before they would act on a collision warning. And, moreover, this uncertainty increases when the potential collision is further in the future. By applying a combination of models and differential algebra, Mireia could not only reduce the uncertainty on the collision probability (up to two orders of magnitude for the ISS) but also increase the lead time to a potential collision. And, on top of all that, at a significantly reduced computational cost, in some cases close to real-time.

Mireia explains that coming up with a new model was a major quest. “I tried everything to find a better , even ideas that seemed laughable at first. In the end, it was just such a laughable idea – my ‘plan D’ – that worked.” It took quite some perseverance. “Every tiny mistake that you made immediately meant that the model did not work. This was quite stressful. You needed to be able to handle the stress and not give up too quickly. You needed to stay positive in the face of failure.”

Read Mireia’s story here: https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/revolutionary-simulation-model-prevents-disasters-in-space

One in seven women in The Netherlands will develop at some point in their lives, requiring surgery or radiotherapy. A quarter of these women develop as a consequence of collateral damage to the lymphatic system, a condition that seriously impacts the quality of life. Photoacoustic imaging, required to treat lymphedema, is considered the next step to increase accuracy in making images of the body, but it is not yet used to its fullest potential. Saskia van Heumen is changing that; for that, she earned the title 2022 of TU Delft - Mechanical Engineering.

She managed to use this technique to more accurately image damaged lymph vessels. This has the potential to make the treatment of lymphedema (fluid accumulation) in the arms, something breast cancer patients often endure, more effective. The technology sends light pulses into the body instead of sound waves. The LED light is absorbed, ensuring that the tissue warms up locally and expands, creating sound waves. As different types of tissue and injected contrast medium absorb light differently, different wavelengths can be used to create images to distinguish them from each other. Together, the sound waves that result then form an image.

The Board of Examiners praises Saskia for her versatility, determination and her organised way of working. She remains modest and stresses that she received a lot of support from her thesis supervisor Professor Gijs van Soest. He told us that Saskia is a joy to work with, an excellent scientist, and a well-rounded technical medicine professional. He also stressed that she managed to complete a very challenging project, in the middle of a pandemic, and still achieved fantastic results. Reason enough to make her the Best Graduate of her faculty.

Read more about her pioneering and impactful work here: https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/even-better-operations-with-led-photoacoustic-imaging

You may not have heard of them, but they play an important role in the hacking of programs: Out-of-bounds writes. These can be used to trick a program into accessing memory at certain locations where that should not be possible. From changing account balances in banking software to breaking into critical systems at hospitals, there are many malicious applications. For his master’s thesis, Linus Hafkemeyer developed a tool making it much easier to assess the severity of such vulnerabilities, speeding up the process of fixing them and, ultimately, leading to a more secure digital society. For this, he earned the title of of the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics & Computer Science.

His supervisor, professor Andrea Continella, is very impressed by his thesis work, calling it a novel and important approach that has very practical implications in the real world. ‘It will speed up the process of fixing these out-of-bound writes security vulnerabilities, leading to more secure programs.’

‘The problem with existing out-of-bounds write detection solutions is that they are invasive; they need to add some code to a program to facilitate detection,’ Hafkemeyer says. ‘But then, when observing program behaviour with the added code, it will differ from how the original, unaltered program would perform, making any output worthless for triaging.’ He designed an approach where no modification in the programme is needed while still fully capable of observing its behaviour without any unwanted effects.

Together with his supervisor, he is now preparing to submit the approach for publication at a well-known cybersecurity conference, expecting quite some interest from security companies and software developers.

Read more about his work here: https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/out-of-bounds-an-outside-view-of-computer-memory-vulnerabilities