Falling Walls Falling Walls Science Summit 2022

Cutting-edge particle accelerator and quantum computational simulations to unveil each step of an enzyme reaction to guide an efficient design of new functions for sustainable industrial applications.

A yeast that naturally produces provitamin A will be genetically engineered to grow using cellulose-based agricultural byproducts. The cultivation process will then be optimized for VAD communities.   Tags: Bio-Tech, Circular Economy, Engineering, Food & Agriculture, Global Cooperation, Green Tech, Resilience, Trust in science.

A recent study shows that hearing is the last sense to go when we die. What is the last sound you wish to hear at the end of your life? Yoko Sen is an ambient electronic musician who spent time in hospitals as a patient, horrified by their noise –…

How the Digital Humanities Help Us Think About the Past to Invent the Future The digital technologies of our times have revolutionised not just the way we live and work in the present, they also change our understanding of the past. Today’s archaeologists are equipped with gene sequencers and 3D…

Cystic fibrosis remains one of the most common fatal genetic diseases, as well as the most common fatal hereditary lung disease worldwide. In recent years, medical scientists have made intensified attempts at understanding the disease mechanism at the core of cystic fibrosis, namely the defect in the CFTR protein. In…

According to Sarah Martell, hydrogen is a promising clean fuel source to replace fossil fuels. Although hydrogen fuel is considered clean and sustainable, common production methods are unsustainable and emit CO2. Her solution is to synthesize a material called porous silicon nanoparticles derived from abundant starting materials. By simply adding…

PRESENTED BY Gen Sakaeda NOMINATED BY Waseda University Tags: Oral Health, Hands Free, Toothbrush, Clean Teeth

Christoph Lotz argues that the development of innovative systems for additive manufacturing techniques combined with in situ resource utilization are a promising solution for permanently going to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Nachtlichter (“Night Lights”) is an app that assists citizen scientists in creating outdoor lighting inventories on unprecedented spatial scales. The app was co-created by a team of German citizen scientists together with researchers at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences as part of the Helmholtz Association’s “Nachtlicht-BüHNE” project. While…

The nominating institution Chinese Academy of Sciences on the breakthrough: Exploitation of heterosis is one of the most important applications of genetics in agriculture. Dr. Bin Han used an integrated genomic and forward genetic approach to construct a genome map for elite hybrid rice varieties and revealed the genomic architecture…

Ayushi Chauhan aims to create a new generation of portable devices for the rapid detection of point mutations responsible for DR-TB. The assay is accessible, scalable, and suitable for high burden TB countries.

Uzair Masood installs wall-mounted vending machines that dispense menstrual hygiene products in female restrooms at public places and workplaces where women are involved, making menstrual hygiene management more convenient.

In this Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation with Liz Madaras and Mónica Feliú-Mójer, digital participants had the chance to discuss and ask questions. The interview series provided an intense personal atmosphere, in which high-level guests, speakers and panelists of the Falling Walls Science Summit 2021 focused on their individual research, career…

As universities face the challenge of COVID-19, the EdTech industry has promised frictionless solutions to maintain educational continuity. These “solutions,” however, are often driven more by the needs of the industry than by the needs of students. The ACE Framework is an educator-created guide for course- and institutional-level design to…

A wearable, connected device that measures muscle activation data and outputs actionable data for personalized, diagnostic decision-making.

Nominated by: Ruhr-Universität Bochum Presented by: Alexander Kanitz

A chatbot tutor harnessing AI and audio to deliver personalised learning to any student on any phone. In 2020, we built a multi-award-winning solution for distance learning by radio to support children without access to the internet; We called it Rising On Air. We were able to scale it to…

Finding expertise & peers within research organization, now, to foster collaboration. Your web-based digital collaboration twin for research organization (academia, corporate or consortia): Makes it easy to access and leverage the most valuable nodes of knowledge within the research world : Research assets + authors. Starting point to faster collaboration…

How Humanitarian Action Urges World Leaders to Prepare for the Next Epidemic At the end of 2013, two-year old toddler Emile was the first patient to die from a mysterious disease in a small village in south-eastern Guinea. A few months later, hospital workers reported similar cases to Guinea’s Ministry…

How the Tropical Laboratory Initiative is increasing Access to Healthcare in Low Resource Countries Tropical Diseases were defined in the 1970s by international organisations such as the World Health Organization as those infectious ailments like malaria, tuberculosis, HIV and Ebola that disproportionately affect poor and marginalised populations in the developing…

Klemens presented his work on “Breaking the Wall of Infection Diagnostics”. He revolutionised infection diagnostics with a simple yet impressive idea on detecting bacteria in blood. He developed an innovative way for specific and rapid pathogen concentration to fundamentally change sensitive and automated pathogen detection at a very low cost.

Our project is aimed to train kids aged (8-14) years coding, so they can be able to program their own programs and games. Also training kids how to design simple educational projects using robots and electronic circuits. We have a cooperation with Iraqi private schools to introduce our courses to…

PRESENTED BY Adan Ramirez Sanchez NOMINATED BY AXEL – The Energy accelerator by Fokus.energie e.V. Tags: Solar Panels, Microalgae, Sustainability, Clean Tech, Space Technology

How Social Science Combats Unfree Labour in the Global Economy We tend to think of the cruelties of slavery as a thing of the past, something that humanity has largely overcome. This assumption is false. Globally, there are some 46 million people in slavery, according to Kevin Bales, Co-Founder of…

The strongest source of free encyclopaedic knowledge is Wikipedia, which currently contains about 6.458.000 articles in English. At the same time, the switch from analogue to digital TV signals and the development of flat screens have made myriads of tube TVs obsolete. A smart combination of these devices can help…

Mark Ferguson has been instrumental in defining and promoting the EIC in Europe.

PRESENTED BY Yuval Gilad NOMINATED BY Yeda Research & Development Co. Ltd. Tags: Edible Insects, Insect Market, Alternative Proteins, Ag Tech, Black Soldier Fly

Professor Huisheng Peng received his B.E. in Polymer Materials at Donghua University in China in 1999, M.S. in Macromolecular Chemistry and Physics at Fudan University in China in 2003 and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Tulane University in USA in 2006. He then worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory before…

For a variety of reasons ranging from our heightened awareness of climate change and concerns for our health to an increased sensitivity to animal welfare issues, the popularity of alternatives to meat has been gaining unprecedented momentum in recent years. Mark Post, who trained as a medical doctor and is…

TruVer, a blockchain-based decentralized credential verification network, guarantees authenticity and significantly simplifies the current certificates certification process.

The innovation is the paradigm shift from conventional thought of content or knowledge transfer in higher education to designing learning from the mobile student experience. To do this, we had to reimagine the learning experience from a mobile student lens. We reimagined learning and learning design from a mobile learning…

Our group periodically visits those schools of Armenia that are far from Yerevan and these schools do not have a physics laboratory so that children can do different experiments and understand the lessons well. In our practice, there was such a case that one student, seeing us and our experiments,…

Mai-Thi’s presentation, “Breaking the Wall of the Human Cell”, focused on the latest breakthroughs in cancer research: Nano transporters breaking through the outer walls of cells in order to efficiently channel medical agents to the inside. As it attacks only cancer cells while leaving healthy cells unharmed, this method will…

How Polar Exploration Propels Climate Research To New Levels Over the past years international teams of scientists have been undertaking fundamental on-the-ground research in the planet’s polar regions to document the changes that are occurring and gain a better understanding of global climate change. A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate…

In cooperation with the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation, Falling Walls was hosting this unique format to connect researchers in the physical sciences from all over the world. The symposium gathered the 2021 Winners in the Physical Sciences category as well as partners from academia and business to discuss the…

Our pioneering simulations of supermassive black hole binaries have linked the theory of galaxy formation with the emerging field of gravitational waves. By probing the physics at scales less than a light year inside colliding galaxies, we have shown that black holes can merge much faster than previously thought, we…

HOW A REACTIVE SYSTEMS APPROACH MAY LEAD TO FULL DYNAMIC MODELS OF MULTICELLULAR ORGANISMS One-day experiments on living beings will be, to a large extent, substi-tuted by interactive simulations on computers. A decade ago, computer scientist David Harel, winner of the Israel Prize, the ACM Software System Award, the Emet…

The nominating institute Technische Universität Braunschweig on the project: Vaccines cannot cure COVID-19. We need an additional medication to cure the infected, and protect the risk populations that are expected to respond to vaccination with success rates far below 100%. This can be achieved by using human antibodies, exactly the…

How Technological Entrepreneurship Saves Economies With Limited Natural Resources When Dan Shechtman became a full professor at Technion in 1986 and initiated a new class on technological entrepreneurship, the word “start up” – which became a mantra after the dot-com boom – was not that fashionable yet. Even today, entrepreneurship education…

Jóse-Alain Sahel elaborated one patient’s journey from having sight, losing it and slowly regaining it after 20 years. He was sharing insights on the process that involves an innovative use of gene therapy, stimulating goggles and lots of training to restore vision for retinal regression.

About the project Adventure in the Plants Kingdom is part of a project funded by National Geographic’s COVID-19 Remote Learning Emergency Fund for Educators Grant. The idea was to equip primary and secondary school learners with an explorer mindset and skills that enable them to discover their surroundings in ways…

Semiconductor Technology: How nanosheets can help humanity keep up with Moore’s law Ever since its inception, Moore’s law has been an integral part of technological advancement. In the past five decades, the semiconductor industry has been following Moore’s trend line to approximately double the number of transistors on a chip…

Innovative materials called complex scattering media allow us to see objects even when hidden behind obstacles. Anwesh Bhattacharya is developing a new infrared camera that can break our invisibility for heat vision.

The nominating institution CUHK on the breakthrough: The cryosphere, the planet’s frozen parts, has undergone rapid warming in recent decades, posing profound threats to people and the Earth systems which are closely connected to all the UN SDGs. With innovative use of AI, computer vision, deep learning, and remote sensing…

To provide education to our students preparing them for an ever-changing environment, Tecnológico de Monterrey decided to set up a new learning model (Tec21), aligning all its processes and components from the institutional vision to the specific learning of students. The new model seeks to prepare graduates not only professionally…

Carried out over 10 years by artist-economist duo Chow and Lin, The Poverty Line visually documents the type and amount of food a person living by the poverty line can buy per day in different case-study Countries. The photographic study is based on data analysis and socio-economic research on lowest-income…

PRESENTED BY Ömer Faruk KOÇ NOMINATED BY Marmara University Innovation and Technology Transfer Research and Application Center (MITTO) Tags: Ag Tech, Automatic Steering

The fast growth of greenhouse emissions in developing countries is a serious cause of concern for the sustainability of the world climate system. Improved quality of life and the resulting consumer behavior changes of large parts of their populations are causing countries such as China, India and Indonesia to rapidly…

PRESENTED BY Enrique Hernández NOMINATED BY CI3M (Centro Nacional de Investigación en Imagenología e Instrumentación Médica) Tags: Breast Cancer, Infrared Thermal Images, Cancer Screening

James Collins is the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, as well as a Member of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences & Technology Faculty. He is also a Core Founding Faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University,…