Sanli Faez

Lili's proto lab opens to visitors at the Faculty Day

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 08:15:00 +0000

Lili’s Proto Lab (LPL), named after the legendary technologist Caroline Emilie Bleeker is a brand new maker space at the Science faculty for turning creative ideas into working prototypes. From 3D printing and laser cutting to microfluidics and robotics, in the LPL you get to practice various prototyping methods and operate these tools. The LPL mentoring program helps your team in managing your prototyping process and brings you in touch with experts from across all disciplines at the Science faculty. Our ambition is to build a community of all those creative and enthusiastic people who like to learn by doing and all those who are willing to support them. By organizing training and mentoring projects, we support students, researchers, and student teams, in their challenge-based projects. We support projects from all UU strategic areas of fundamental science, education, open science, and sustainability.

At the Science Faculty Day 2022, we gave participants a sneak preview of the proto lab, and they made their own wooden flower pots.

The funding for the proto lab is granted by the UU Science Faculty to a proposal from Pauline Krijgsheld and myself. Lennart Herlaar and Jacob Seifert have joined us from January to plan, procure, and prepare for the opening of Lili’s proto lab to students and staff of the Science Faculty and to great new projects and hardware challenges.

Research Funding Consultation by the Young Academy

Sat, 21 May 2022 09:00:00 +0000

If you could consult all academics in your country, what questions will you ask?

Science policy decisions have a major impact on academicsl. However, it is not always clear who makes these decisions, and whether these decisions have really been made after broad consultation with the community—especially of those community members, who are not naturally ‘at the tables’. How can we also include these voices? And in doing this, how can we move from polarized stance-taking to a more nuanced discussion, acknowledging the real dilemmas a policy-maker may face?

At the De Jonge Akademie we started an experiment on broad participatory decision making. We have adopted the participatory value evaluation method, which has been developed by fellow researchers at the TU Delft, and has successfully been applied in large-scale citizen consultations on topics that spark fierce societal debate, such as the lifting of coronavirus measures or installation of wind turbines on land.

In our first case, we are running a consultation on science funding: a topic that affects all academics. At present, discussions are taking place about possible funding reforms, which trigger strongly polarized responses on how they should be allocated. If we would address all academics in the Netherlands and ask them to weigh their preferences on this matter, what insights can we gain? By choosing this method, we wish to create an evidence-based collective signal that can better inform the policymakers.

This project has been concieved in October 2021 by five newly elected members DJA, Shari Boodts (Radbout University, Nijmegen), Chiel van Heerwaarden (Wageningen University), Lizza Hendriks (Maastricht UMC+), Cynthia Liem (Technical University of Delft), and myself. The consultation questions has been decided in three workshops and several dicussion sessions between November 2021 and May 2022, with assistance from Populytics There is a list of Frequently Asked Questions on The Young Academy website.

I had an interview with Ad Valvas (in Dutch) about the project and our goals.

Joining a taskforce to consolidate the research agenda on climate change

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 18:15:00 +0000

At the request of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Dutch Research Council (NWO), a taskforce has been set up to realise a joint agenda for integral climate research. I am asked to join the taskforce which is chaired by Heleen de Coninck (Eindhoven University of Technology/Radboud University Nijmegen) who was a Coordinating Lead Author in the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5C. The other members of the taskforce are Han Dolman (Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research), Jan Willem Erisman (Leiden University), Liesbeth van de Grift (Utrecht University), Marjolijn Haasnoot (Deltares), Carolien Kroeze (Wageningen University and Research), Andrea Ramirez (TU Delft), Gerard van der Steenhoven (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute), Linda Steg (University of Groningen), and Diana Suhardiman (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies).

As mentioned in the announcement The establishment of this taskforce follows a recommendation made by the Permanent Committee on National Institutes (PCNI) and from the insight that different and sometimes widely separated areas of climate-related research will need to cooperate very closely in the future. PCNI’s inventory revealed, amongst other things, that Dutch researchers consider the problems concerning climate change to be of such a level of complexity and urgency that the entirety of Dutch science must join forces as quickly as possible.

FAIR-battery is granted an Unusual Collaboration grant

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 10:02:00 +0000

The FAIR Battery project recieves an 180 kEuro grant from the Center for Unusual Collaborations (CUCo). In this project, which started as a CUCo Spark, we are envisioning a world in which access to renewable energy is democratic, governed locally, and is built upon mutual exchange of knowledge and technology without exploitative transfer of natural resources. We plan to enhance the diffusion of knowledge on energy storage by structuring a design lab that prioritizes local needs and access to developing battery systems and uses open science to educate and enable a network of experts and end-users in choosing the best route for their locally sourced energy grids.

We also aim to create an open-source electrochemical battery (FAIR = Findable + Accessible + Interoperable + Reproducible) and make the platform radically accessible: 1- by deliberately using low cost and locally available materials suitable for local user groups, and 2- by setting up the education communities on top of the open-hardware design.

On this route, we thrive to not only provides the necessary technical details for engineering and production, but also incorporates the local constraints for actually adopting and using the technology. These constraints relate to language, availability of materials and expertise, maintenance capacity, or other locally varying conditions, which must be identified as part of the project. Our envisioned FAIR-Battery platform will track and seek to remove these constraints in each stage of the development by direct consultation with the user-groups.

This project is guided by an interdisciplinary team of researchers: Antoni Forner-Cuenca and Yali Tang (Technical University of Eindhoven), Maarten Voors and Stephanie Hobbis (Wageningen University), Peter Ngene, Toon Meelenm and myself (Utrecht University), which introduece themselves and our main goals in this short video.

Back in November 2021, the closely related FAIR-Battery knowledgebase project, recieved an Open Science Fund grant from the NWO.

Recognition for The Climate Helpdesk

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 13:22:00 +0000

The KlimaatHelpdesk has its one-year anniversary on 30 October 2021. In just one year, the platform had 121 climate questions from the general public answered by experts (and have them peer-reviewed), with the help of 40 volunteers, and an expert network of over 250 climate experts, mostly in the Netherlands. On 8th of October, the KlimaatHelpdesk received recognition for the great efforts and enthusiasm of everyone involved in the project: the platform made it to number 36 on the Trouw Sustainable 100. On 14 October, we also won the Pathways to Sustainability Award 2021.

I have been involved in setting up the platform from its idea-conception in one of the Scientists4Future NL assemblies in 2019. We recieved a great boost after the project was selected as one of the flagships by the Utrecht Young Academy, which has since supported the initiative continuously and generously. Since July 2021, the project is administered by an independent non-profit foundation with the same name, to which I have the honour of sitting in the board of directors.

Here is a nice, in-depth coverage of this initiative by the Utrecht University Green Stories.

Official installation as a member of De Jonge Akademie

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 19:05:00 +0000

As of today, I am officially a member of the Young Academy of the Royal Dutch Academy of Science . The Young Academy (de Jonge Akademy in Dutch or in-short DJA) is a dynamic group of active scientists and scholars in the Netherlands with outspoken views about science and scholarship and the related policy. They organise inspiring activities for various target groups focusing on interdisciplinarity, science policy, and the interface between science and society. Each year, a special committee made up of some members of the Young Academy and the Royal Academy selects ten new members who are installed by the chair of the academy for a period of five years. DJA has been one of the main sponsors of the Climate Helpdesk after its launch, before I knew that I was selected.

Here is how I introduced myself and talked about my concerns and ambitions for the following five years as a member:

Utrecht Degrowth Symposium: From circular economy to circular society

Fri, 15 May 2020 16:45:00 +0000

I helped my colleagues at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development and the Dutch degrowth platform to organize the 2nd Utrecht Degrowth Symposium: From circular economy to circular society. In this symposium, we connected to stakeholders from academic and non-academic institutions to discuss the holistic societal transformations needed to address the pressing socio-ecological crisis of the 21st century on climate change and resource depletion.

UYA Climate Pledge

Thu, 05 Mar 2020 16:15:00 +0000

Together with Liesbeth van de Grift and Erik van Sebille, we presented the UYA Climate Action Pledge to the President of the Executive Board of Utrecht Univesity, Anton Pijpers. We appealed to the Utrecht University leadership to step up sustainability ambitions and sign a pledge. The UYA Climate Action Pledge embodies both the acknowledgement of the high risk of our current national policies and the urgency of action, as well as key suggestions for an adequate response to the climate crisis. The president stated the board’s support for our actions and adn that they will adopt the pledge and concomitant actions.

Spin-off company

Sat, 02 Feb 2019 21:39:32 +0000

Together with Aquiles Carattino and Nascent Ventures, we recieved a take-off grant for characterization of nanoparticles in solution

An NWO Take-off grant has been awarded for commercialization of the nanoCET platform, a device that can measure the size, concentration and charge of nanoparticles while in solution. With a commercial version of this device, we hope to accommodate a very large group of researchers in different fields.

Here is an extract form the UU news item about this grant:

“The novelty about nanoCET is the fact that samples are investigated in a solution, which keeps particles in their natural three-dimensional shape. The device can thus optically track nanoparticles like single viral proteins. It consists of an optical fiber with a channel smaller than a wavelength of light. Inside this channel, light runs through an aqueous sample that contains nanoparticles. The light is scattered, and nanoparticles are detected by the microscope.

With the NWO Take-off grant of 40,000 euros, the Light in Complex Systems group of the Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science will be able to do a feasibility study in the first half of 2019, investigating the expected success of spin-off company. The invention itself was done in 2015, when Sanli Faez worked at Leiden University. Watch the video made by Harvard University at that time.”

Summer-in-lab in Oxford

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 21:39:32 +0000

For the past two month, I had the great pleasure of doing experiments with Philipp Kukura’s group at the department of Chemistry in Oxford. This was an opportunity created by the superb hospitality of Philipp and his group members, and me not taking enough vacation days for the previous two years. Spending most of my time in the lab and getting my hands busy with some of the most sensitive optical microscopes in the world was a remarkable experience. I am no stranger to sensitive microscopes, but the iSCAMS technology, with its unique combination of sensitivity and ease of operation, is a real breakthrough. Each week I saw some visiting researchers coming with their samples in ice-boxes and at the end of the day leaving with a smile on their face because of the incredible measurements they could take in a single day.

Philipp generously allowed me to play with their setups and try some crazy ideas. We were quite lucky that a couple of those ideas worked really well, or perhaps they weren’t crazy enough. Crazy or not, the common interests we discovered this summer will hopefully be the beginning of some fruitful collaboration between our teams at Oxford and Utrecht.

I also spent several weekends rowing in an eight on the Thames under a pleasantly clear sky. For the three weeks that Bahar and Soline joined me, we could spend ample good time together and with friends, playing, punting, and sight-seeing. That couldn’t possibly be as pleasant if we did not have that exceptionally sunny weather and the company of our very good friend Taha.