Alexander Newman

Dang Huyen Chau of the TU Dresden was the jury’s choice and the overall 1st place winner of the global Falling Walls Lab Finale 2016. Dang presented her research on recycling oil-rich coffee grounds in order to offer an alternative biofuel.

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…

The nominating institution Karlsruhe Institute of Technology on the breakthrough: Puchta is a pioneer who demonstrates that CRISPR/Cas as a site-specific nuclease can be used for restructuring complete plant chromosomes. He elucidated major mechanisms of DNA double strand break repair, and he is one of the leading scientists adopting this…

Power Asymmetries: How big platforms change the organization of society Our society is increasingly defined by big platforms and their algorithms. Google is already an integral part of education and the workspace, while Facebook, Amazon and Spotify heavily influence how we communicate, what we buy and what music we listen…

Ana León Rodríguez is addressing the issue of microglial priming in the brain, caused by events like traumatic brain injuries, leading to increased neurotoxicity and the risk of neurological diseases. Her solution involves developing a vaccine using the immunomodulatory properties of Mycobacterium vaccae, a soil-derived bacteria, to attenuate microglial priming…

In this Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation, digital participants had the chance to engage in a live conversation with Sheila Jasanoff. She talked about her role as Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, the ethics of genome editing and the importance of doing interdisciplinary research.…

Borja Martínez Téllez discovered that oral supplementation with a gut microbe which was found in the gut of young and elderly adults increases muscular strength by 30% in the absence of exercise training.

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.

Random numbers are widely used for information security, cryptography, stochastic modeling, and quantum simulation. We invent a scalable, robust, energy efficient method for physical true random number generation using a semiconductor laser chip of volume less than 1 mm cubed. Ultrafast emission fluctuations are digitized to produce hundreds of random…

Nominated by: Australian National University Presented by: Mark Mattingley-Scott