The largest part of the above knee amputee population consists of elderly people with a limited physical condition. Current actuated prosthetic knees are too heavy to be worn by the majority of amputees. This proposal describes the commercialisation of an innovative new prosthetic knee, which is 50% (!) lighter than current prostheses, so that it can be used by the elderly amputee. This knee, the Energy Restoring Knee, helps the amputee during sitting down and standing up. The knee enables the elderly amputee to stay independent and continue living at home. The proposed project will demonstrate the technical feasibility of the Energy Restoring Knee in a home trial. The commercially feasibility will be demonstrated by performing a market exploration and by writing a detailed business plan.

The global carbon cycle represents the collection of complex biogeochemical processes that influence our climate and link all carbon pools on Earth. Soils play a very active and key role in this cycle, as upon sequestration in marine sediments they act as long-term sink of atmospheric CO2. A large part of organic carbon (OC) stored in soils is continuously mobilized and either returned to the atmosphere or transported by rivers to the oceans. However, the fate and residence time of soil OC within in a river basin is often overlooked, and our understanding of potential feedback mechanisms to our climate remains far from complete. In this project I aim to determine the origin of soil OC in a river, the transformations that soil OC undergoes during its transport from land to sea, the duration of this transport, as well as to assess the factors that control these processes. For this I will utilize a suite of soil bacterial membrane lipids, branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (brGDGTs), as specific molecular tracers of soil OC. River-transported brGDGTs stored in continental margin sediments may reflect the integrated climate history of the river basin, as their initial distribution in soils is determined by temperature and soil pH. The novelty of my approach lies in the combination of these molecular tracers with an array of advanced isotopic techniques (13C, D/H, 14C) and inorganic chemistry (Neodymium isotopes). This allows me to monitor soil OC during its complete journey from terrestrial source to sedimentary sink. The new information resulting from this project will deepen our understanding of the role of soils in OC storage and export, and thus the carbon cycle, and will improve our interpretation of paleoclimate records based on down-core variations in brGDGTs preserved in marine sediments.

One of the main challenges of modern physics is to quantize general relativity. Unlike the other interactions that take place in a fixed spacetime, in the case of gravity the spacetime itself is the dynamical entity to be quantized. This suggests that to quantize gravity a non-perturbative and background-independent approach is needed. My research interests focus on non-perturbative quantizations of gravity, and in particular loop quantum gravity (LQG) and spinfoam models. I am primarily interested in the derivation of a theory for quantum cosmology. Several reasons motivate my research. First of all, without a quantum theory for cosmology we lack a complete description of the dynamics of the early universe, as our current paradigm, the inflationary scenario, suffers from an initial big bang singularity that we expect to be solved by quantum gravity effects. On the other hand, cosmology might be the only accessible way to test quantum gravity. The adaptation of LQG to cosmological scenarios is known as loop quantum cosmology (LQC). LQC has been mainly developed for the quantization of homogeneous models, yielding an important result: The quantum geometry effects solve the cosmological singularities by means of a quantum bounce mechanism. LQC is one of the fields where I will focus my research. I want to look deeper into the quantization of anisotropic models, for which the quantum dynamics remains unsolved. Furthermore, I want to analyze the quantization of inhomogeneous models in LQC, in particular considering cosmological fluctuations, with the aim of pushing further the development of a quantum theory for inflationary cosmology and extract predictions from it, such as modifications on the power spectrum of cosmological fluctuations. LQC has been derived from canonical LQG. I am also interested in developing quantum cosmology from the spinfoam approach, the covariant version of LQG.