Onsager Fellowship Programme
The Onsager Fellowship Programme at NTNU is designed to recruit young, internationally recognized researchers to strengthen the university's academic community.
The Onsager Fellows work on topics ranging from robotic vision to theoretical condensed matter physics and marine structures for the future.
Downloadable photos of the Onsager Fellows at NTNU (Flickr)
Photo: Thor Nielsen/NTNU
Erin Bachynski
Marine Structures for the Future – Marine Technology
I work with the development and application of numerical tools and experimental techniques in the area of marine structures for renewable energy. In order to design safe and efficient structures to harvest the vast renewable energy resources offshore, we need better understanding and modelling of the loads and responses of offshore wind, wave, and tidal energy devices.
Chiara Bertolin
Zero Emission Refurbishment of the Built Environment
My research focuses on microclimate studies for built environment and cultural heritage preservation. I intend to use an innovative, non-destructive technique suitable for aged/heritage materials to directly trace the risk of mechanical damage in real and controlled environments.
Charles Butcher
Economics of Natural Resources and Quantitative Peace Research
My research focuses on understanding violent and nonviolent uprisings in authoritarian regimes. In particular, I am interested in how bargaining between the state and non-state groups drives the onset, duration, and outcomes of resistance movements.
Jeroen Danon
Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics
I work in the field of theoretical condensed matter physics, mostly focusing on problems related to quantum information applications and often in close collaboration with experimental groups. Current directions of my research include devising and improving (topological) qubits in solid-state devices and understanding transport properties of complex superconductor-semiconductor hybrid structures.
Stefan Geiss
Public Opinion Formation in a Transforming Media Environment
I study the dynamics of opinion formation in politics, media coverage, and among citizens: Which topics move into the public’s focus, and which are overlooked? Which messages resonate, and which go unheard? How do processes of media change transform the way we make up our minds? The goal is to empower citizens to form well-considered opinions, and specify which messages are conducive to that end.
R. Jason Hearst
Environmental and Applied Turbulence
Turbulence is omnipresent in flows of engineering and practical interest, yet we still don’t have a full understanding of it. Through fundamental experiments, I work to improve our knowledge of the intersection of turbulent flows with our daily lives, from wind turbine energy output, to more efficient pipelines and carbon capture, to airflow around buildings.
Josef Kiendl
Marine Structures for the Future – Marine Technology
My research is in the field of computational mechanics for structural analysis. This includes the elaboration of mathematical models to describe complex mechanical behavior on the one side as well as the development of computational tools in order to enable an efficient design-analysis workflow for engineering applications. I want to focus these methods specifically to applications in marine structures.
Ekaterina Kim
Risk-based marine systems design for Arctic operations
«Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty», – Jacob Bronowski.
My research is driven by challenges in the Arctic and a desire to develop methods and tools for risk-based analysis, design and operation of marine systems and structures.
Richard Kumaran Kandasamy
Medicine – Systems Biology
Inflammation plays a major role in the initiation and pathogenesis of a number of diseases such as sepsis, atherosclerosis and diabetes, among others. My research group aims to understand the molecular aspects of inflammation and antiviral signalling using state-of-the-art modern technologies to identify drug targets for treatment of inflammatory and infectious diseases.
Dave Kush
Linguistics
My research investigates the structure of the mental representations that support human language understanding. A major part of my work focuses on how language users build linguistic representations in real time.
Barbara van Loon
Medicine – Molecular Biology
My research aims to understand the impact that exposure to toxic environmental and endogenous agents has on the well-being of living organisms. Using a translational approach, I study how changes in essential biomolecules contribute to the development of diseases, such as cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Michael David Martin
Evolutionary Genomics of Natural History Collections
Research in my lab involves analysing genome sequences in order to reconstruct and interpret the evolutionary histories of plants, animals, and their pathogens. I am particularly attracted to cases in which ancient DNA derived from natural history collections allows us to explain present-day distributions of biodiversity by looking directly into the past.
Dennis Meier
Inorganic or Hybrid Functional Materials
My research studies the emergence of novel states of matter, arising from the intricate coupling of spin, charge, and orbital degrees of freedom in low symmetry systems with strongly correlated electrons. Of special interest are functional nano-objects that can serve, for example, as information carriers or miniaturized electronic elements in future devices.
Jonas Moeck
Modeling and control of unsteady phenomena in thermo-fluid systems
Many technical systems have been optimized over the last decades. Significant improvement, for example, an increase in efficiency, reduction of pollutant emissions, or enhanced operational flexibility, can often only be achieved by managing or possibly leveraging unsteady phenomena. I use experimental and theoretical methods for this purpose.
Nicola Paltrinieri
Risk Assessment
My research addresses the development and enhancement of risk assessment methodologies for the prevention of major accidents. I focus on safety-critical complex systems within the chemical and petroleum industry.
Annette Stahl
Robotic Vision
In my research I'm concerned with the development of approaches that utilize the combination of visual and other sensor information for unmanned vehicles (AUVs, UAVs, USV, rovers) that have to navigate/plan and act in real time under water, on ground, air or in space. Currently I focus on the innovative application of advanced mathematical methods in robotic/computer vision and machine learning for solving problems in maritime environments.
Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia
Institutions and economic development in historical perspective
My research analyses how societies build different institutional settings, the conditions under which these institutions evolve, and their influence on economic development. Currently, my work focuses on the link between inequality and educational outcomes in historical perspective.
Martin Wagner
Plastics, the environment & health
Today, we live in the plastic age. As biologist and toxicologist, I am interested in how plastic materials and chemicals leaching from it affect the environment and human health. My research contributes to understanding the complex interactions of man-made agents with biological systems with the aim to develop science-based solutions.
Xu Wang
Complex Brunn-Minkowski theory
The complex Brunn-Minkowski theory is a complex (number field) version of the classical Brunn-Minkowski inequality in convex geometry.
It was established by Berndtsson around 2005 and has found many applications in complex analysis, K\”ahler geometry and algebraic geometry.
Video: Rector Gunnar Bovim welcomed NTNU’s new top researchers in the Onsager Fellowship programme at a reception.
Lars Onsager
The Onsager Fellowship programme is named after the Norwegian-American chemist and physicist Lars Onsager (1903–1976).
He received a Ch.E. degree from the Norwegian Institute of Technology, that later became NTNU, in 1925.
In 1968 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work done in 1931 on irreversible thermodynamics.