Falling Walls Falling Walls Science Summit 2022

This Winners Session presents the Top 10 breakthroughs in the Science and Innovation Management category. From Stanford University to the Max Delbrück Center, and from EPFL to CERN – every institution, and with it every society, faces challenges. How to share knowledge? How to improve the Peer Review Process? How…

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.

Voice of nature art installation uses a living tree to uncover the impact of climate change in real time. In collaboration with the scientific partner Stefano Mancuso of the LIVN lab of the University of Florance and the sensor department of the Technical University of delft Artist Thijs Biersteker Developed…

Gerhard Widmer talked about what makes music come alive, what it means for a computer to learn fundamental principles of expressive (piano) performance, and how, by using this learned knowledge, it can contribute to expressive music making – not as a replacement for human pianists, but as a musical companion.

Huiming Bu was talking about humanity’s attempts to keep up with and surpass Moore’s law. In IBM’s case, that entails decreasing the size of chips while increasing their performance and energy consumption. Stacking the chips on a three dimensional plane will improve their efficiency and power the next generations of…

Biotech Innovation in Europe and Germany 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. How could Europe create a global ‘hotspot’ of biotech…

Better medicines faster by automated design. The project integrates constructive artificial intelligence (AI) into the pharmaceutical drug development progress. The central theme is to transfer decision making from the human science manager to a machine intelligence that generates novel molecules with desired properties from scratch. We devise suitable algorithms and…

PRESENTED BY Kadas Ella Maria NOMINATED BY BIH Innovations of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin Tags: Retinal Imaging, Deeper learning, 3D Modeling, Neurological Disorders, Brain Health, Machine Learning, Healthcare, AI in Healthcare, Monitoring

The nominating institution German Aerospace Center on the project: It is a challenge to provide adequate living for a rapidly growing urban population. To cope with population influx, demographic shifts and climate change requires functioning and resilient cities. Here, a combination of Big Earth Data, AI and modern ICT can…

Environmental Change: Christian Scharun investigates missing greenhouse gas emissions in datasets that contain reported data from the countries and is developing a method to adjust them with the aim of better understanding climate change.

The nominating institution DWIH SAO PAULO on the breakthrough: The German language is known for long words with many consonants. This makes many learners consider German an impossible language to learn let alone pronounce. How can we use our mobile phone to overcome the challenges of learning German? Through the…

The nominating institution DAAD on the breakthrough: Treating your vagus nerve can help to break walls between people. It controls how our heart is beating, and is responsible for many phenomena ensuring a positive social functioning. Laborde started his research career because of the headbutt of Zidane in 2006, willing…

Rocket-science without rocket-science: As a spin-off from the German Aerospace Center we develop and vend space science-based experiments and workshops to schools and universities. Our story-telling approach starts with catchy questions (“Who wants holidays on Mars?”, “How will we save our Planet”) and encourages pupils to participate in the course.…

The nominating institution Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH on the breakthrough: Playing LEGO with molecules promises to be an appealing approach to facile fabrication of unusual nanostructures. Attractive quantum functionalities have been shown, but there is a problem: Molecules defy intuitive handling, their behaviour is hard to predict. To address this challenge,…

How Epidemiology and Prevention in Young Women Can Achieve an AIDS-free Generation The war against AIDS is fought on many fronts. Whether it is raising awareness about safe sex, developing preventive measures or working with patients in hospitals, on a vaccine or a cure: tackling the largest HIV epidemic in…

The nominating institute Charité on the breakthrough: Petra Ritter has developed “The Virtual Brain”, a computational platform for the virtualization of brain structure and function. It uses novel concepts from computational, cognitive and clinical neuroscience. By using personalized data, patient-tailored models are created to better understand pathomechanisms in the brain,…

It is a “climate-smart agriculture” concept that includes ecological sanitation to increase agricultural productivity, reduce GHG emissions, and address public health issues in Ethiopia. Tags: Circular Economy, Climate change, Education, Energy, Environment & Nature, Food & Agriculture, Future /green cities, Renewable energies.

The rapidly growing gap between social media and real life is one of the most powerful sources of political tribalism in the world today. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter fuel status-seeking extremists and make moderates seem invisible, leaving all of us feel more polarized than we really are. New…

Little Big, Science is a voluntary Registered NGO, that was founded to bridge the apparent gap between the scientific community and the general public in Israel in a direct way. Our goal is to expose our readers and followers in the social media platforms, to the exciting discoveries, the thrilling…

Natalie Driemeyer is the first person who researched about how theatre people worldwide deal with this topic. She exploired in her work that the more the countries in question are affected by the consequences of climate change, the more the theme is treated on stage. Theatre can be a place…

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…

An environmentally friendly chemical compound used as a high-quality shield in X-ray attenuation. The chemical compound is characterized by its flexibility and ease of formation. Tags: Bio-Tech, Circular Economy, Digital Health, Engineering, Environment & Nature, Future /green cities, New Work, Trust in science.

In my project, we work on the possibility of encoding information in OAM modes and multiplex these modes in optical fiber for transmission. Tags: Science Communication.

How Open Journalism Saves Publishing in the Digital Age The decline of many major international print outlets – due to their difficulties in adapting to the ways information is shared and consumed online today – is not news, but continues having dramatic effects on the traditional regional and global media…

The nominating institute Geomar on the breakthrough: The independent evolution of pregnancy in most vertebrate groups required drastic morphological and genomic reorganisation. Roth’s project focuses on adaptation in male pregnancy evolution in pipefishes and seahorses, evolving on a gradient from external fertilisation to full pregnancy. Only this genus allows the…

Superheroes against Superbugs (SaS) initiative partners with young children to raise awareness of antibiotic resistance (ABR; a subset of Antimicrobial resistance or AMR) to promote community dialogue and action. The program uses Grassroots comics, a simple, cost-effective engagement tool that enables children, irrespective of their artistic skills, to develop their…

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…

Marcel Kempers partners with local coastal businesses to collect and apply data-to-decisions (for coral nursery planning, etc.) and with marine research organisations to advocate for participatory science.

By combining the achievements of the arts, history and technology, Prof. Miyasako, who leads the ‘Research on cultural sharing’ group in the TUA-COI project, is creating “Clone Cultural Properties” and “Super Clone Cultural Properties” which reproduce the DNA of arts. The research group is increasing countries’ cultural value by promoting…

The “Computational Problems: Future of Quantum Computing” Round Table examines our current crossroads moment in the development of quantum computers. After 25 dynamic years of fundamental theoretical and experimental research, the top leaders in the field worldwide, and in Germany, have committed themselves to the development of quantum computers as…

Oxide glasses are an integral part of the modern world, but their usefulness can be limited by their characteristic brittleness at room temperature. Megan Cordill et al. show that amorphous aluminum oxide can permanently deform without fracture at room temperature and high strain rate by a viscous creep mechanism. These…

Our vision is to empower women/girls to optimise their careers in neuroscience and STEM. Our missions/aspirations are to improve networking opportunities for women in neuroscience/STEM, encouraging excellence by yearly Esipirisa Chinna Orish ECO Award to the best female neuroscience student, running a Neuroscience Journal Club, organising lectures & workshop, disseminating…

PRESENTED BY Magdalena Hauser NOMINATED BY University of Innsbruck Tags: Quantum Technology, Quantum Computing, Quantum Ecosystem

The nominating institution University of Helsinki on the breakthrough: Ovaskainen and Abrego have developed a Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC) framework, which revolutionizes how data on ecological communities is analysed and interpreted. HMSC allows data integration on species abundances, environmental covariates, species traits, phylogenetic relationships, and the spatio-temporal context. …

A bioprinting platform that accelerates the development of novel printing technologies based on an ecosystem of toolheads, bioprinters and software, designed to fulfill the evolving research needs. Tags: Bio-Tech, Covid-19, Digital Health, Education, Engineering, Food & Agriculture, Med-Tech, Open Access, Robotic, Science Diplomacy, Science Policy, Trust in science, Bioprinting, Tissue…

While digital media offer the opportunity for people of all walks of life to gain access to essential information, digital literacy is a necessary component of achieving an informed citizenry. From public health info to active political engagement, knowing how to find and interpret reliable information online is essential. While…

Information is to society as air is to a living organism. We have come a long way to embrace nature protection, conservation, and resource management in our pursuit of environmental quality. A similar comprehensive framework to ensure the quality of our information environment is however missing. My work builds on…

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.

The Travelling Telescope is a social enterprise dedicated to promoting science, technology and sustainability through astronomy and space endeavours. We run a biweekly quiz for anyone across the planet to join in, test their astronomy knowledge, test their music knowledge, and learn a little from our esteemed guests who give…

HOW PRIMATE NEUROSCIENCE REVEALS THE MECHANISMS OF OUR PERCEPTION Who does not fear attention disorders? How many times have we over-looked what was right before our eyes? Many are the paranoias of a society drowning in a deluge of information. While we know that attention disorders, like attention deficit hyperactivity…

The nominating institution TUM on the project: Novel anti-bacterial drugs are needed to treat multiresistant pathogens. Our research focuses on expanding the scope via compounds with novel mechanisms of action. A major breakthrough represents the discovery of a new type of antibiotic overcoming several previous limitations. The molecule addresses unprecedented…

PRESENTED BY Teresa Baumann NOMINATED BY Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Tags: Biopharmaceutical Process Development, Digital Twins, Mechanistic Modelling, Bioprocessing 40

The Tactile Universe is an outreach project at the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation. We are developing accessible teaching resources and workshops to make current topics in astrophysics, traditionally a visual science, accessible to young people with vision impairments. By running training workshops for science communicators across…

Tatjana Geukens will set up a program for metastatic breast cancer patients to donate liquid and tissue samples rapidly after death for extensive molecular profiling and the generation of tumour models.

Our curriculum and science engagements make learning science a fun, hands-on and relevant experience for 3 – 14 year olds. These are offered all-year round through our science clubs running both inside and outside schools. We also train young scientists to be great science communicators through our fellowship program. During…

The nominating institute TU Darmstadt on the breakthrough: Species and natural ecosystems are disappearing at alarming rates. This is due to land use, drought and global warming. We’re only beginning to understand properties that stabilise species communities and their interactions. Blüthgen has developed novel methods to understand such ecological networks…

In this Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation with Mark Ferguson, 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 paths and experiences.…

PRESENTED BY Michele Bandecchi NOMINATED BY University of Novi Sad Tags: Soil Health Sustainability, Time to act

How the use of optogenetics can restore vision to the visually impaired Seeing is not, as the proverb goes, merely believing, rather it is a literal window to the world. Losing our eye-sight means a major loss of personal freedom and, in most cases, implies an irreversible condition. While there…

Nominated by: TU Darmstadt Presented by: Markus Hessinger