The RAPTORplus consortium gathers excellent research institutions, academic hospitals and non-academic particle therapy (PT) centres, industrial corporations and public organisations. It offers a platform for intercultural, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral training and education of doctoral candidates (DCs) in the field of medical physics focussing on right-time adaptive PT. The assembled infrastructure and expertise from academia, clinic and industry is needed to address the challenges of personalised adaptive PT. PT is a precise form of radiotherapy with a growing number of centres treating patients. It targets localised cancers while sparing healthy tissue, but might deliver suboptimal doses in case of anatomical changes. To exploit the full potential of PT, fast and safe online treatment adaptations must be enabled and performed if beneficial, e.g. indicated by image-based biomarkers, biological models or other response data. The research projects conducted at academic and non-academic facilities will tackle (1) the efficient realisation of online-adaptive PT (OAPT), (2) the technological completion for broad and safe use of OAPT, and (3) a further treatment personalisation by biomarker-based adaptation. The network uses a multi-sectoral approach to ensure that the DCs develop scientific, clinical and practical industry-relevant skills. The holistic training programme includes in-person training camps, online trainings, project-specific secondments, training in tutoring, research communication, entrepreneurship and science policy, and opportunities to participate in international conferences and professional networks. RAPTORplus will train the next generation of research leaders, medical physicists and entrepreneurs to be aware of the necessity of right-time adaptive PT. They will drive innovation in the coming era of adaptive PT and improve cancer care through enduring international and cross-sectoral collaborations based on their transformative thinking.

The production and use of energy account for more than 75% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions. Decarbonising the EU’s energy system is therefore critical to reach our 2030 climate objectives and the EU’s long-term strategy of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. Obviously solar and wind power will play an important role in any future energy scenario, but such intermittent sources present significant challenges in energy transport and storage. At the same time, a vast amount of low-grade heat is generated, e.g. in datacentres, food, pulp and paper industries, and is available 24/7. Even converting only a small percentage of this heat into electricity is significant due to the sheer amount of heat wasted just above ambient temperature. However, efficient technologies to convert this low-grade heat in an economically sound way are lacking Within this project, we will develop thermomagnetic harvesting from current TRL 3/4 proofs of principle to an efficient and cost competitive TRL 6/7 technology. Our interdisciplinary consortium of 9 academic institutes and 4 industrial partners address all major challenges for this emerging technology, which requires innovative designs of more efficient thermomagnetic generators, that are intimately connected with tailored thermomagnetic materials. Our team consists of engineers, who invented thermomagnetic systems at various sizes and power ranges, materials scientists with ample experience in advanced magnetic materials, bulk or film preparation and characterization, and physicists, who cover modelling from the ab initio scale, via micromagnetism at the mesoscale, up to the macroscopic device scale. This rich multidisciplinary environment will allow training of 10 young professionals by cross-fertilization with fresh ideas. They will obtain the interdisciplinary competence required to bring this green technology to a mature level, and career perspectives in both the academic and non-academic sectors delivering the Green Deal.

Prospective biosensing technologies will need to tackle the grand challenges arising from the global demographic changes. Among the most crucial tasks is the monitoring of food and environmental quality as well as the medical diagnosis. Digital fluidics offers vast advantages in performing these tasks relying on tiny containers with reacting biochemical species and allowing massively parallelized assays and high throughput screening using optical detection approaches. I envision that adding not-optical detectors, which electrically probe the analyte responses, will provide a source of new but complementary information, obtained in a label-free and contactless manner. Hence, these all-electric platforms enable monitoring the kinetics of chemical reactions in lab-on-chip format, as well as take over auxiliary tasks, e.g. indexing, counting of droplets, flow monitoring. In frame of the ERC project SMaRT, my team developed a unique detection platform -millifluidic resonance detector- that inductively couples to an analyte and assesses its physico-chemical properties. The unique selling points are (i) non-invasiveness to analyte, (ii) unnecessity of a transparent fluidic channel, (iii) cost efficiency and (iv) portability. Implementing the input from the partner companies, here I aim to reach the commercialization stage pursuing a number of key milestones, i.e. enhance the screening throughput, realize a platform independent of external electronic devices, provide a temperature stabilization of the response, and develop the app. Societal benefits: We demonstrated that the device provides an access to the metabolic activity of living organisms in droplets. This is way beyond the capabilities of the state-of-the-art optical detection. With this feature, the device can address the issue of increasing antibiotic resistance of bacteria and thus help to optimize the antibiotic policy in hospitals and households and to test new drugs in a time- and cost-efficient way.