31. March 2020

Other March News in Brief

Jørgen Kjems has received DKK 25 million of the Carlsberg Foundation for Corona Research; Peter Ouma Okeyo of IDUN is behind a method for characterizing early drug development; QDev has received a grant from the Siemens Foundation; Victor Aguirre from SAC is behind a new study in the Astrophysical Journal Letters; and Rubina Raja of UrbNet participated in a podcast about Palmyra. All this in the DNRF’s Other March News in Brief here.

Jørgen Kjems and research colleagues receive DKK 25 million for corona research by the Carlsberg Foundation

While the world has stalled because of the new coronavirus, a group of researchers from the University of Aarhus, the University of Copenhagen and Statens Serum Institut have received DKK 25 million from the Carlsberg Foundation to jointly develop methods to equip us to deal with future viruses. The research team consists of Professor Jørgen Kjems, who is the center manager at the DNRF’s Center for Cellular Signal Patterns (CellPat), at the University of Aarhus. In collaboration with the other researchers from the University of Copenhagen and Statens Serum Institut, Kjems will work on developing methods to diagnose, treat and prevent SARS-CoV-2 infections in the future.

Read more about the grant to Professor Kjems and the rest of the research team in a press release from Aarhus University here

Post-doc from IDUN develops new and better method for characterizing medicine

Peter Ouma Okeyo, a post-doctoral fellow at the center of excellence IDUN at the Technical University of Denmark, led the development of a new method that can reduce the costs of early drug development. The method is called particle mechanical thermal analysis (PMTA), and unlike existing methods, the PMTA method can perform analyses directly on a single drug particle. This means that any impurities that may have been present in larger quantities of the drug’s materials can now be filtered out and thus the analysis can be carried out with much greater accuracy on a pure drug particle.

Read the scientific article about the research behind the method in Nature Communications here

Read more about the PMTA method here

QDev receives a grant from the Siemens Foundation

The DNRF’s Center for Quantum Devices (QDev) at the University of Copenhagen has received a grant of DKK 29,872 from the Siemens Foundation. The money has been awarded to the basic research center for the purchase of special equipment, specifically a very low noise amplifier, which is needed when amplifying weak signals in the development of future quantum computers.

Read more about the grant to QDev in Sciencereport here

Victor Aguirre of SAC behind a new study in the Astrophysical Journal Letters

Associate Professor Victor Silva Aguirre from the basic research center Stellar Astrophysics Center (SAC) at Aarhus University led a major study recently published in the scientific journal the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The study is the first step in the first asteroseismic group study of giant red stars observed by NASA’s space telescope, TESS. In the study, researchers will measure 25 stars and determine each star’s basic properties, such as radius, mass and age.

Read the scientific article in the Astrophysical Journal Letters here

More information about the study can be found in AAS Nova here

Raja participates in a podcast about Palmyra

In a podcast you can hear Professor Rubina Raja, the center manager at the basic research center UrbNet, and archaeologist Anne Marie Nielsen talk about the ancient tomb portraits from the exhibition “The Road to Palmyra” at the Glyptoteket in Copenhagen. The podcast is produced by seesound.dk.

Listen to the podcast on Soundcloud here

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