Left picture: WUR student Sophie van Lange and Eindhoven student Roel Borgers of the Beads vs Beats team. Right picture: WUR students make up the entire Good Gut team (from left to right: Jip van der Linden, Severin te Lindert and Mark van Leeuwen).
The Chemistry top sector’s student competition is organized in partnership with the research funding agency NWO and is being held for the fifth time. Three teams will be competing for the main prize, which will be handed out in December at the Chains conference. The Good Gut team consists entirely of Wageningen honours students. Jip van der Linden, Mark van Leeuwen and Severin te Lindert are working on a microcapsule that you can ingest to introduce live intestinal bacteria into your guts. This could be an alternative to faecal transplants for people with an intestinal disease. The Beads vs Beats team pairs Molecular Life Sciences student Sophie van Lange with Roel Borgers, a Mechanical Engineering student at Eindhoven University of Technology. They aim to develop a material that effectively deadens low frequency sounds. This ‘metafoam’ is a porous matrix with minuscule beads in the pores that respond to a sound wave with anti-resonance. The third team, Cavity Catalyst, is from the University of Amsterdam and is focusing on the use of light-matter coupling to control and influence molecular properties.