Veronique Van Speybroeck received an ERC Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for her ambitious project TIME. This funding is amongst the EU’s most prestigious and competitive, providing leading senior researchers with the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs.
With the TIME project, Veronique has the ambition to fully unlock the time dimension as a powerful design parameter for next-generation nanoporous materials important for catalysis, separation and sensing. Showcase applications include catalysts that convert CO₂ into valuable chemicals, or materials capable of performing highly selective and energy-efficient separations.
When a feed of molecules is sent over a nanoporous solid, they undergo a fascinating journey characterized by various events like adsorption, diffusion, reaction. Today we lack knowledge on all time aspects of such a molecular trajectory. Hence we can not use time as a control parameter to steer the functionality of nanoporous materials.
The TIME project proposes a paradigm shift and aims to fully grasp the time dimension of a molecular trajectory from the nano- to the crystal particle level. The dream is to follow in time what happens with a feed of molecules during a real catalytic or separation experiment.
For further reading:
- https://molmod.ugent.be/TIME
- https://www.ugent.be/en/news-events/six-erc-advanced-grants.htm
- https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/erc-2024-advanced-grants-results
