The team is convinced that it will make a difference in three domains critical to mankind: energy, water and health. These may seem very diverse, but essentially, they are connected by the same kind of molecular processes which play a key role. It is exactly about these molecular processes that Johan Martens and Francis Taulelle have gained innovative insights.

In their NMR center, they continue to improve methods to study structures and processes, which provides knowledge relevant to a multitude of research areas. Unfortunately, the insights from those different domains are nowadays hardly shared or combined. Inspired by the latest convergence science model from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this new fund wants to change this lack of sharing knowledge.

It wants to encourage cross-fertilisation and that way cost-effectively develop convergent molecular models in the domains of energy, climate change and human health. New technological concepts and engineered solutions which – in contrast to the existing slow and old approaches – will not be bottlenecked but indeed will help answering the grand challenges of humankind.