State-of-the-art research in the Amsterdam metropolis
Science Park, in the Amsterdam metropolis, is the place where boundary-pushing, state-of-the-art research takes place. The institutes at Science Park, such as the CWI, Nikhef, SARA, and AMOLF, are helping to make important scientific discoveries nationally and internationally.
Major discoveries, such as imitating the situation after the Big Bang in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. Nikhef (the National Institute for Subatomic Physics) is one of the partners that helped to develop the magnets required for the particle accelerator, enabling about a billion protons to travel 27 kilometres in the world’s largest and strongest particle accelerator on 11 September 2008 – the aim being to answer the question, where do we come from and where are we heading?
ICT technology and molecular players
SARA is another example. This organization supplies high-grade ICT technology to researchers so as to enable complex analyses to be carried out that would otherwise have been impossible. Technology such as SARA’s national supercomputer, Huygens, one of the fastest computers in the world.
One of the areas that AMOLF, is working on is molecular players that – for the first time – will reveal hypoxia-driven processes in breast cancer cells. AMOLF is also an international leader in the field of nanotechnology, the technology of the future par excellence.
Mathematics and Computer Science
The Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), also based at Science Park, works together closely with other research institutes and industry. It has developed software, for instance, to reduce hospital waiting times by means of better planning.
The Centre is also managing a new project on alternative energy sources, the SenterNovem project ‘Smart Decentralized Management of Networks and Data’ (IDeaNeD). The Dutch partnership this involves between experts from both computer science and the electricity industry is unique. In addition to providing fresh ideas, IDeaNeD is hoped to result in practical products that can be used by energy companies, enabling the grid to support new developments such as the large-scale use of electric vehicles.
The UvA’s Faculty of Science has ten research institutes that are celebrated for their research in the fields of Astronomy, Mathematics, High-Energy Physics, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, Life Sciences, Computer Science, Experimental Physics, and Logic, Language and Computation. These are just a few examples of the wealth of research going on at Science Park Amsterdam and the knowledge that benefits companies and students.
