In the second round of 2016, NWO awarded Rubicon grants to Delft alumni Fabai Wu, Bas Hensen, and Joshua Island.

Fabai Wu will move to the USA to work at the California Institute of Technology to develop new technology to study how microbes smartly divide their energy budget to survive and grow. The results will help us predict their response to climate change and how we can use them to rescue ecosystems.

Bas Hensen will use his grant to work as a postdoc at the University of New South Wales (Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology), in Australia to work on his project entitled 'Long Range Entanglement in a Silicon Quantum-processor'. In the coming two years he will study the quantum chips of the future, aiming to answer the following question: how do we connect the millions of required quantum bits on such chip?

Joshua Island will continue his research at the University of California-Santa Barbara in the USA, where he will construct the fundamental building blocks (quantum bits) of a universal topological quantum computer in a new experimental system consisting of graphene heterostructures.

Twenty-one grants
The NWO Rubicon grant offers young scientists who have recently obtained their PhD the opportunity to gain research experience at foreign top institutes, as stepping stone towards a scientific career. In the second round of 2016 NWO received 77 proposals, of which 21 eventually got funded.