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Villum Young Investigator grant to new AIAS Fellow Mie Andersen

Nanoscientist Mie Andersen has been awarded a Villum Young Investigator grant of DKK 8 mill to study design principles for materials that can convert CO2 into fuels or chemicals to help us tackling climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels.

Photo: Mie Andersen, new Villum Young Investigator recipient and AIAS Fellow.

In one week, researcher Mie Andersen will start her fellowship at AIAS, and with it now comes along a Villum Young Investigator grant of DKK 8 million from the Velux Foundation. Mie Andersen returns to Denmark from a position as group leader at Technische Universität München (TUM), Germany, to continue her research in theoretical materials science and chemistry at AIAS and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Aarhus University.

Using catalysis to convert CO2

The Villum Young Investigator grant is awarded for her project ‘Machine learning-guided design of materials for low-temperature catalysis’ that will study the design of a material that can catalyze the conversion of CO2 into fuels or chemicals to help us tackling climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels.

The project will contribute to this goal by using theoretical methods based on machine learning to direct the search for a material that can hydrogenate CO2 to methanol at low temperatures. The grant enables Mie Andersen to build her own research group and to fund the recipient, one postdoc, two PhD students and computational resources over the next five years. 

“This grant is highly important for my research and academic career as it will allow me to start my own group in Aarhus and realize a much more ambitious research project than what I could have achieved on my own”, says Mie Andersen.

More about the Villum Young Investigator grant

Talent, cutting-edge expertise and ambitions for research careers are what Villum Young Investigators are made of. The Villum Young Investigator programme allows talented Danish and international researchers to pursue their ideas and establish their own research groups at Danish universities. Since the programme was started in 2011, a total of 184 researchers have been given the title – and part of a total grant of over DKK 1.2 billion.

https://veluxfoundations.dk/en/19-new-villum-young-investigators-in-2021

Contact

Mie Andersen, Associate Professor, AIAS-COFUND Fellow
E-mail: mie@aias.au.dk

Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, AIAS
Høegh-Guldbergs Gade 6B
DK-8000 Aarhus C

Denmark