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Materials Science: Professor Sohini Kar-Narayan awarded €2 million ERC Consolidator Grant

31 January 2023 Fellows

Congratulations to Professor Sohini Kar-Narayan, a Fellow of Clare Hall, who has been awarded a €2 million five-year European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant to develop new tools for remote health monitoring and personalised medicine.

Professor Kar-Narayan is one of 321 researchers to have won 2022 ERC Consolidator Grants. The funding – worth €657 million in total – is part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme helping excellent scientists who have 7 to 12 years’ experience after their PhDs to pursue their most promising ideas.

On receiving the grant, Professor Kar-Narayan comments:

I am absolutely delighted to have been awarded a Consolidator Grant to develop new tools for remote health monitoring and personalised medicine. These include novel non-invasive ‘point-of-care’ biosensors, which could potentially be self-powered through energy harvested from the body, thus enabling a step change in health monitoring and patient care.

Working in the Device Materials Group here at Cambridge, Professor Kar-Narayan’s research aims to develop functional nanomaterials and devices for applications in energy, sensing and biomedicine. Her work involves piezoelectric, ferroelectric, magnetoelectric and thermoelectric nanostructures for harvesting and harnessing ambient waste energies, and extending these functionalities to sensing applications as well. She focuses on employing scalable and low-cost physical and chemical synthesis approaches to fabricate novel phases and functional nanostructures for incorporation into devices, with the aim of developing early-stage prototypes and eventual commercialisation of energy harvesting and self-powered sensing technologies. An example is the spin-out company ArtioSense Ltd., which she recently co-founded, seeking to deliver low-cost conformable sensors that can aid orthopaedic surgery through real-time force monitoring in joints.

President of the ERC, Professor Maria Leptin, shares, ‘ERC Consolidator grants support researchers at a crucial time of their careers, strengthening their independence, reinforcing their teams and helping them establish themselves as leaders in their fields. And this backing above all gives them a chance to pursue their scientific dreams.’

Congratulate Sohini on LinkedIn.

Read about the seven other University of Cambridge researchers who have been awarded ERC Consolidator Grants.