SensUs goes
live!

Finally, after months of hard work, including the summer holidays, we can proudly say that our website is in the air. We are very excited to present SensUs to the world, the first international student competition on molecular biosensors for healthcare applications.

Early 2015 professor Prins was looking for people to work out his idea: "I was thinking about a novel way to stimulate the development of technologies in the field of molecular biosensing. A way that should bring together talented young people from different scientific disciplines and from different countries. That's how the idea to start an international student competition was born, which we named SensUs."

An enthusiastic team of students gathered to work on SensUs as part of their Honors Track in the TU/e Honors Academy. We organized ourselves with Chair, Vice-Chair, and groups focussing on Technology, Logistics and Communications. We are very happy to see the ideas taking shape, behind the curtains and now also in public.

The Technology group works out the technical challenge that is to be addressed by the participating teams, in particular the biomarker that is to be measured and the sample matrix. Potential challenges are being discussed with professors and other stakeholders, and we will announce the selected challenge at the latest on the first working day of 2016. The Logistics group is developing an interesting program for the contest days in September 2016, when all participating teams will convene in Eindhoven and will demonstrate their biosensing systems.

In the coming months, students from University of Leuven, Imperial College London, Uppsala University, Danish Technical University and Eindhoven University of Technology can apply via their local contact person (see apply). SensUs 2016 is a pilot year with still a limited number of universities; more universities will be able to join in 2017.

We expect to see great things from the participating teams. Professor Prins: "I strongly believe in the creativity of people and the power of teamwork. Molecular biosensing technologies are difficult to develop because a broad set of scientific and engineering skills are required. The competition will result in novel ideas, novel technologies, and in novel collaborations between universities, companies, and other stakeholders in the field of healthcare."

We are looking forward to November 2015 when the teams will have been formed at the five universities, which will kick-start the first edition of the SensUs competition. Professor Prins: "We hope to develop a scalable multi-year contest wherein students will address challenges of increasing complexity in a focused manner, across several countries, for the benefit of healthcare." There is still a lot of work to do for the SensUs organizing team, but we are already looking forward to September 2016. We expect to meet awesome teams, see inspiring projects, interesting technologies, and have fun along the way!

If you would like to learn more about SensUs, click here.