The Nordic and Baltic countries are boosting research in aquaculture with nine new research projects. Among other things, the projects are to develop sustainable feed for salmon farming. The Director of NordForsk says this is an important step along the Nordic region’s path of becoming the world’s most sustainable region by 2030.
For the first time, NordForsk has begun funding projects under its Programme for Interdisciplinary Research. With a total budget of roughly NOK 176 million, the programme spans a wide range of research topics, from narwhal tusks to smart textiles to historical perspectives on pandemics.
NordForsk has decided to fund four postdoctoral research fellowships for young researchers in Denmark and Sweden within the Nordic Neutron Science Programme. The projects will receive a total of 6 million NOK.
We follow the principles of “Integrative Social Robotics,” a strictly value-oriented approach, and for this reason focus on the use of robots as facilitators of human social interactions, and not as replacements of human actors.
Overall, our goal is to bring together critical mass and to form a network to serve particularly Nordic industries that could benefit from progress in smart textiles.
The key breakthrough we aim to accomplish in this project is based on specific advantages of graphene: i) its ability to physically penetrate the bacterial biofilm, and ii) its ability to serve as a loading point for large amounts of hydrophobic drugs.
Bengt Sundelius is chair of the programme committee for NordForsk’s Nordic Societal Security Programme. We asked him to identify some of the challenges facing the Nordic region at this very moment.
