Climate change and our civilisation’s push on the planetary boundaries demand an urgent shift of production industries to rethink their value chains, production solutions and technologies to a circular approach. This goes for Grundfos and many others.
The programme supports research efforts to facilitate this transformation. Real-world problems and strong partnerships will be the starting point for such research efforts.
A few decades ago, Danish water research was in the top international league on wastewater treatment solutions and groundwater. The priorities in Danish academia have changed and other countries have taken the lead.
This programme aims to bring Danish water research back to a leadership position with relevance for the water agenda of the future.
“We participated in the Science EXPO in April, and the Stockholm Junior Water Prize is in August. In between, we were privileged to visit researchers at DTU Environment who guided us with regards to report structuring and developing our research poster. They also let us use some of their equipment to refine our experiments,” the boys explained when we caught up with them during a short break at the conference centre in Stockholm.
All four participated in a tightly packed special conference programme for Stockholm Junior Water Prize contestants, while only two (Kristian Katholm Nielsen and Sebastian Lykke Dalsgaard) were allowed to present the project to the international jury.
Nonetheless, all four had a learning experience for life, enjoying access to both interesting people and new knowledge.
“It was amazing to meet and spend time with the rest of our competitors. We all work on different projects, but in the end our interests are similar, as we all want to contribute to a water safe future,” concludes Rasmus Thoft Nygaard.
Meet the 2019 Stockholm Junior Water Prize participants:
Stockholm Junior Water Prize finalists 2019 from SIWI on Vimeo.
The Department of Computer Science in Aalborg is set out to expand with two new international professors, each with four full-time postdoc positions at their disposal, thanks to a grant from the Poul Due Jensen Foundation. The two professorships will fall under two separate research groups in the department.
The business community is hungry for university graduates in Computer Science, and this looks set to continue for a long time to come. Over the past ten years, the Department of Computer Science has had significant growth in the number of students, and with two new professorships, the university wants to both generally strengthen as well as future-proof the area.
Top researchers head the two research groups that will be home to the two new professorships. The high-profile researchers, Professor Kim Guldstrand Larsen (distributed, embedded and intelligent systems) and Professor Christian Søndergaard Jensen (databases, programming and web), both have long CVs and have achieved many significant results, and they are also the two most cited computer scientists in Denmark. Kim Guldstrand Larsen received the prestigeous Grundfos Prize from the Poul Due Jensen Foundation in 2016.
Aalborg University (AAU) has distinguished itself with groundbreaking solutions for effective management and analysis of temporal, spatial, and multidimensional data in relation to e.g. transport and green energy, as well as with efficient and automated validation and optimization of software embedded in products, such as safety critical software in cars and intelligent traffic management systems.
Computer science is a very important area for AAU where they have always been on the forefront. Digitalization will undoubtedly be the biggest technological force for change in society in the coming decade. By strengthening the area, we ensure that AAU continues to deliver usable knowledge and graduates to business and to society.
The Poul Due Jensen Foundation has granted 17 million kroner, covering both employees up to 2023. AAU then takes over the full financing of the appointments, thus future-proofing the two professorships.
“Inspiring science for teachers and students” is meant as a contribution to creating more exciting science teaching in public schools and secondary education institutions. In the long term, the purpose is to increase the interest of pursuing a career in science and/or technology among young people in Denmark.
The House of Natural Sciences develops and tests learning activities within four main areas:
The Poul Due Jensen Foundation helped build Naturvidenskabernes Hus in Bjerringbro in 2005 through a 15 m DKK donation.
WATEC opened in October 2017 as an interdisciplinary strategic research initiative, bringing together and reinforcing water technology research in a broad sense, from mapping water resources and the natural water cycle to wastewater management and development of sensors to control water purification and identify harmful substances in water.
Through basic research, the centre aims to produce new insight, and utilise this insight to arrive at new and better solutions through applied research within water technologies.
“Research at the centre will address crucial social tasks, while at the same time generating considerable potential for Danish industry – for existing as well as new businesses within the Danish water sector,” said Niels Christian Nielsen, Dean, Science and Technology, Aarhus University.
The four donations from the Poul Due Jensen Foundation will make a direct contribution to strategies at the research centre.
The donations will fund:
WATEC is headed by Professor Niels Peter Revsbech, who was awarded the Grundfos Prize in 2013 for his development of advanced sensors and his research into the relationship between microorganisms and the natural conditions under which they live. Indeed, to a great extent, WATEC is based on Professor Revsbech’s achievements; both as a researcher and as an inventor.