ERC Consolidator Grant
Award year: 2020
Category: Scholarship / Grant
Type: ERC Consolidator Grant
Awarding organization: Europäischer Forschungsrat (ERC)
Prof. Dr. Henry Dube is an unusual engineer: he builds molecular machines. The challenge he faces is that if you shrink technology down to molecular size, you are left with the question of how to process information at the molecular level and operate the technology. An approach from photochemistry has proven valuable. If you shine light on a molecule it moves from state A to state B, thereby working as a ‘photoswitch’. Prof. Dube is working to build photoswitches which can be moved to not just two but a number of different positions, giving them a higher information density. This would allow molecular machines to work much more precisely and let them be used for much more complex tasks. For example, materials could be given different properties or robotics systems could execute very precise gripping movements.