Falling Walls Falling Walls Science Summit 2022

In this Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation, digital participants had the chance to engage in a live conversation with Paweł Rowiński. He talked about his role as Vice-President of the Polish Academy of Science, the process of rebuilding the science landscape of Ukraine, what advice he would give to aspiring scientists…

Michaela Vojníková argues that bioceramic scaffolds can be prepared by using a freeze-casting method. This allows people to prepare pores appropriate for nerve guidance with a length of more than 3 cm and from a biocompatible material.

While most of the work in the laboratory is focusing on improving transplantation and modulating the immune system in medical settings, due to the unique tools developed in the lab, Benyamin Rosental and his team translate their research to ecological questions. The most unique project we perform in the laboratory…

Fiberhouse is an informal research and education center located in Asheville, NC. Partnering with farmers, artists, designers, fiber folks, and scientists we are studying soil to soil methods – creating cloth that heals together. We facilitate hands-on workshops and learning experiences for people of all ages and backgrounds in-person and…

The Nairobi Ideas platform is comprised of free events including the Nairobi Ideas Night, a recurring informal public event for local researchers, scholars and other nerds to present their ideas to the public, and the Nairobi Ideas Exchange, which gathers participants to deep dive into issues in their unique fields…

In the 1930s, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a “New Deal” policy to overcome the Great Depression. Less than 100 years later, the world is facing an even more global challenge: the climate crisis. In this Falling Walls Plenary Table, our international panelists ask whether this requires an equally…

Ready to take a deep dive into the Top 10 breakthroughs in the Physical Sciences category? This Winners Session will take you from the bottom of the ocean all the way to outer space to explore the most remote living environments. Learn about new ways to observe climate-related changes on…

C-DELTA is a breakthrough in creating a platform for large scale training on digital education for students and teachers around the world for free. It is about how to make digital learning more efficient for individuals and the society by recognising digital identity and footprints online, creating and sharing digital…

COVID-19 – Current Trends in Vaccine Research Falling Walls Circle Tables will give the spotlight to world-leading scientists, science strategists and policy-makers from academia, business and politics discuss how we can apply science, research and innovation to get the world moving again. Vaccinations provide a pathway to recovery from the…

Vaccine Distribution in Geopolitical Context Falling Walls Circle Tables are lending the spotlight to world-leading scientists, science strategists and policy-makers from academia, business and politics discuss how we can apply science, research and innovation to get the world moving again. Vaccines are one of the most valuable tools at our…

The Next European Particle Accelerator – Does CERN Need Another Supercollider? Falling Walls Circle Tables are lending the spotlight to world-leading scientists, science strategists and policy-makers from academia, business and politics discuss how we can apply science, research and innovation to get the world moving again. Europe is currently investigating…

The nominating institute Fastagger on the breakthrough: Kariuki labels African-focused satellite images for AI use cases. He also develops AI that will aid companies in establishing solar infrastructure projects and agriculture. Tags: Artificial Intelligence

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…

Through an installation/performance the artist Maja Smrekar reflects on the social dimension of Artificial Intelligence, questioning the power relations in terms of technological development and data sovereignty, and how these affect the relations between human and animals. “Technologies such as AI need a social dimension and not only the economy,…

How Genetics Provides New Tools for Understanding Innate Immunity Humans and other organisms are under constant threat from deadly invaders – viruses, bacteria and other microbes which infiltrate the body, create dangerous toxins and damage or kill cells. Along the line of evolution, organisms developed sophisticated defence mechanisms to deal…

How Micro- and Optoelectronics Lead to Transparent and Paper Transistors If you are happy that your mobile phone does not weigh 1 kilogram and cost $4000 like the first handheld model from 1973, you will appreciate the efforts of Elvira Fortunato, who is working on making technology as cheap and…

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…

Real or Fake is a fun, participatory format, which trains citizens’ ability to discern science from pseudoscience. Scientists take stage with a compelling and yet controversial thesis based on true or false arguments. Audience discusses and votes. Scientists reveal the truth and how it can be uncovered. The citizens learn…

Protein Analytics: To understand how a biological system works, monitor the structures of the thousands of proteins within it. My laboratory has developed a technology that generates a new type of molecular data with which we can look at the structures (or shapes) of the proteins in living systems. We…

The Journal of Sketching Science, is a publishing platform that summarises complex scientific research as illustrations. The journal was designed as a companion to traditional scientific journals being an extension of the popular blog Sketching Science. It helps fighting fake news and report complex science in an accessible and engaging…

Neuroprosthetics: How electronics can be used to mimic the biology in our brain The human brain is made up of anything between 80 and 100 billion neurons. How exactly these basic working units communicate with each other and transmit information through electrical impulses at the synapses, is a crucial matter…

PRESENTED BY Varinder Singh NOMINATED BY Chitkara University  

Yi Long is a Fellow of the royal Royal Society of Chemistry and currently serving as scientific editor for Materials Horizons. She obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK with full Overseas Research Scholarship (ORS), United Kingdom Cambridge Trust, Graduate Scholarship of Selwyn College. Her research focuses on…

The nominating institution CNRC on the project: Shen offers a robust living cell platform that is widely accepted by regulatory authorities for manufacturing human vaccines. It has been used as a technology platform for development, and has potential for high-yield manufacturing of established vaccines or novel vaccines for emerging diseases,…

The nominating institution KIT on the breakthrough: Electronic signal processing suffers from limited bandwidth. This wall can be teared down by combining electronics with photonic circuits and with optical frequency combs as ultra-precise clocks. This approach unlocks a wealth of applications – from ultra-fast data communications to material analysis via…

Shujaaz network connects young people with the information, skills and resources they need to take control of their own lives; embedding them in a digital and real-world community that gives them the self-belief to succeed, in their context and on their terms. The HMBA program – An MBA for hustlers-…

LifePorte Educational project implements several educational flagship projects geared towards science engagement and advocacy. These includes Science advocacy for youngsters (SAPFY) and Train-the-trainers Biology workshop (TTTBW). Science advocacy program for youngsters (SAPFY) exposes elementary and high school students to basic science experiments. Students are trained to be creative with scientific…

Rhys Pirie won first place at the Falling Walls Lab Finale 2019 with his pitch on Breaking the Wall of Broken Glass. Rhys convinced the jury in three minutes by presenting a low-cost process which turns ‘waste’ glass into high-value products such as detergents, tyres, and even toothpaste.

Asteria Tsapadikou has designed a synthetic biosensor that detects gut metabolites, which serve as an indicator for the functional evaluation of the GI tract and tackles gastrointestinal disorders by engineering a live biotherapeutic supplement.

Working at the intersection of technology, art and design, Jiabao Li creates new ways for humans to perceive the world. “TransVision” questions the habitual ways in which we interpret the visual world intervened by digital media through three perceptual machines. In “Glacier’s Lament”, she collaborated with glaciologists to turn esoteric…

Many scholars have understood that the liberal (international) order is under stress inside and outside the “liberal core.” However, most take the state in its Weberian form for granted. Areas of limited statehood are ubiquituous and it is the combination of limited statehood and order contestations which characterizes the contemporary…

The science communication center creates customized content considering different audiences, through the lines: “learn” dedicated to general public, “update” oriented to professionals or specialized public of related areas, and “Apply” for decision makers. The interaction with the audience through social media, experiments, collaborations with national and international institutions guides them…

I tell the story of the NASA Space Pen in 60 seconds. It starts out by saying “What you’ve been told about the NASA Space Pen is a lie”

I work on many projects that address digital science education, particularly working with overlooked communities. I work primarily in various classrooms around the world, designing, building, testing, and researching adaptive and interactive science pedagogies, particularly ones that contain a digital component. This had led to many innovations in digital science…

Peter Baum is a professor of physics at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His current research in Konstanz focuses on the interaction of light and matter at ultimately small dimensions of space and time, using electron pulses under light-cycle control. Atoms and electrons are the two central constituents of all…

Nominated by: Marco Casteleijn, VTT Technical Research Center of Finland Presented by: Christopher Landowski

Stannie Rameliarison and her team teach fruit and vegetable producers how to dry their crops in order to store them longer and provide them with solar dryers and a market where they can sell the dried products.

Born out of the #WirVsVirus hackathon in March 2020 and further developed at #EUvsVirus, LabHive.org is an online-tool to match qualified researchers and labs offering their under-utilized resources (labour, equipment, reagents, experience with lab techniques or data analysis) and needs of diagnostic laboratories. This innovative concept emerged as a response…

In this Winners Session, you will be introduced to the Top 10 breakthroughs in the Life Sciences category. The presented work revolutionises our understanding of the complex human body, revealing that it is now possible to fight brain cancer in new ways, tackle COVID-19, fight different diseases with our very…

Volkan Sezgin addresses the ways in which to shape old fashioned, non-digital trade diplomacy, suggesting that trade diplomacy should be based on digital trade fairs and conferences and that trade agreements, which lie in the heart of trade diplomacy, should focus on getting digital aspects into action.

AgroDynLux aims to manufacture and commercialize new chemical herbicides that combine synthetic and organic solution benefits and help farmers to safely control weeds and maintain their crop yield.

We used nanomaterials to demonstrate light-powered levitation of microflyers. For the first time, we devised macroscopic objects that can fly without any moving parts using photophoresis, or light-induced airflow. This new flight mechanism will enable 1) sunlight-powered meter-scale vehicles in the upper atmosphere collecting information about our changing climate and…

The world has clear goals on reducing CO2 emissions to limit catastrophic climate change. But society needs chemicals – fuels, fertilizers, precursors for plastics and pharmaceuticals – where do these come from if we must reduce and eventual stop fossil fuel use? With easy availability of low-cost renewable electricity comes…

Kai-Wen Yang has developed an innovative medical device that can perform minimal open reduction and internal fixation to unite the vertebral compression fracture.

How Sociology Can Mediate Between Islam and Western Modernity The world’s biggest refugee crisis since the second world war is bringing ten thousands of migrants to Central Europe – former citizens of Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan or Somalia fleeing from war, dictatorship or religious extremism. The fact that most of the…

PRESENTED BY Laura Bücheler NOMINATED BY Profund Innovation – Freie Universität Berlin Tags: Haptics, Future of Mobility, Feel it

For millennia, humanity has pondered the origins of our universe. It was only a few decades ago that new inventions in the realm of space science, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, have provided faint, yet valuable insights into this origin story. This year, its successor, the James Webb Space…

Journey between designer Salome Bazin (Cellule Studio) and myself, a bioengineering scientist, aiming to shape the future of cardiovascular healthcare by creating conversations with citizens and cardiac patients in particular. Two milestones of our collaboration have been “Big Heart Data”, a series of 50 3D printed hearts, and “Kalostasis”, an…

Life is built from proteins, like the cells in our skin, hair, eyes, and also viruses. We have developed am approach to exploit the quantum properties of proteins to translate them to sound, and use it to better understand biomaterials, and treat diseases. Based on the similarities between the structure…

LabEscape is a non-profit outreach activity whose goal is to show that science can be accessible, relevant, beautiful and fun, via a unique science-based escape room experience. Agents must solve a series of jaw-dropping puzzles based on various physics phenomena – objects will literally disappear before their eyes! – though…