The YIN Award 2024 for the best grant proposal went to Gözde Kabay and Nadja Henke. They will work together to design novel treatment opportunities for treating inflammatory neurological diseases with focus on multiple sclerosis. The second grant supports Maryna Meretska who teamed up with YIN alumnus André Butz. Their goal is to create a cheap, lightweight greenhouse gas detection metalens camera for CO2 concentration detection in the atmosphere with improved resolution. Finally, the third out of eleven applications that got a YIN Grant goes to Susanne Benz and Somidh Saha. They will investigate the cooling potential of city trees at the local scale in parks and streets.

Susanne Benz, KIT

Aquifers contain the largest store of unfrozen freshwater, making groundwater critical for life on Earth. Focusing on diffusive heat transport, Susanne Benz and colleagues have simulated current and projected groundwater temperatures at global scale. The result: groundwater at the depth of the water table (excluding permafrost regions) is conservatively projected to warm on average by 2.1 °C until 2100. However, regional shallow groundwater warming patterns vary substantially. Thus, by 2100, more than 77 million people are projected to live in areas where groundwater exceeds the highest threshold for drinking water temperatures set by any country.

DDF, KIT

The construction sector produces over 40 percent of all CO₂ emissions worldwide and the cost of raw materials rises. Circular economy and more sustainable architecture requires innovative approaches. Moritz Dörstelmann and his team combine digital design and fabrication strategies with historical architecture and novel materials based on natural resources. Digital technologies are applied to upscale natural construction materials to high-performance components. In their demonstration project, the researchers reinterpreted half-timbered houses: They present their combination of wood and willow-clay composites at the "Landesgartenschau" until October 6, 2024.