Francesca Grisoni, an associate professor the Molecular Machine Learning Group and the Chemical Biology Group since March 2021, works with her team at developing new methods to apply artificial intelligence to molecular sciences.

Her aim is to be able to make new, smarter drugs. Discovering them is a challenge because there are too many possibilities. The ‘chemical universe’ includes more than 10^60 different molecules – far more than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. To test all of those for their usability is beyond humans. Artificial intelligence offers promising opportunities to efficiently traverse a huge amount of complex molecular data and distil relevant information.

Soft robots

Since September 2020 associate professor Bas Overvelde is the group leader Soft Robotic Matter Group at TU/e and at AMOLF (since 2016) and he researches soft robots made of resilient and ‘intelligent’ material. That softness offers a solution in places where robots need to handle fragile objects such as fruit, or inside the human body.

For example, Overvelde is working on developing a soft artificial heart, which works in a more natural way than existing artificial hearts. By combining experimental, computational and analytical methods, he aims to create robots without a centrally controlled computer, which can move and react to their environment thanks to built-in reflexes in their robot bodies. Learn more about Overvelde and his research here.