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For Assistant Professor Simon Jappe Lange, international conferences and stays abroad have been crucial to his career and results at DTU.
A trip to Delft in September was inevitable for Simon Jappe Lange. Delft University of Technology is the largest technical university in the Netherlands, and it hosted the annual conference in Simon’s field – terahertz (THz) technology. He is an assistant professor at DTU’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Photonics and part of a research group working with this hitherto neglected light technology with rather unique properties.
For example, if you use THz light to look at the bottom of a ship, you can see all the individual layers of paint that the ship has been painted with and can thus optimise the ship’s propulsion through the water to reduce fuel consumption. Using THz light to look at tablets for pharmaceutical use, you can inspect the tablet’s coating and ensure that the tablet’s active ingredients are released in the right place in the body. In other words, THz technology provides deeper insight into a wide range of products and chemical compositions.
Simon’s primary task is to package and demonstrate the functionality of THz technology to companies and eventually get them to use the technology. His long-term goal is to create a Danish-based THz technology ecosystem consisting of both product developers and buyers of the technology.
And then we’re back to Delft. Simon and the rest of the research group are not succeeding in this mission by spending all their time at DTU. That’s why he has received several grants from the Otto Mønsted Foundation for conferences and stays abroad.
Conferences create ideas and relationships
“At such a conference in Delft, I first and foremost get a lot of inspiration. Different researchers give lectures to each other, you talk to each other and many new research ideas arise precisely when people are taken out of their everyday lives and have time to think about something new that you hear at a conference, for example. There’s also a fairly large international network that turns up at these events, so this is also where you find your international collaborators and nurture the relationships you have. And the ability to work internationally is also something you’re assessed on as a researcher,” explains Simon. In his opinion, international conferences are particularly important.
“You’re very isolated when you’re at a university, and the way you experience the world is often through research articles that everyone writes. But you can’t possibly read everything that’s published. So going to a conference like Delft becomes the place where we all share our view of the world and you realise where your work fits into a small context – just like when a company has to define value propositions for some product. And it simply won’t be possible to find out where you create value if you don’t go to these international conferences.”
Abroad became plug and play
Simon has had a fast-paced career, and several stays abroad have provided the professional building blocks for this. In 2012, he received a travel grant for an exchange programme in Brazil and later, in connection with his PhD thesis, he was a visiting researcher at the University of California in Santa Barbara. He has also been an intern at Innovation Center Denmark in Silicon Valley and has shared Stanford University as a home base for his Master’s thesis.
“It was probably the later stays that were the most professionally formative, but the first stays abroad gave this feeling of “it’s just something you do”. Professionally, the stays abroad have meant that I have dealt with some things that I would not have had the opportunity to do at home. It’s very much the idea of a context that I’ve brought back with me and some perspectives on what we work with at home and a broader understanding of how to conduct research elsewhere. The latter plays an important role in your ability to manage people who come from all over the world, which is also the reality when you come back to a Danish university. If I had to put my finger on what has helped build my current success, it has very much been about being able to engage and motivate international researchers across research branches and different nationalities around a common goal.”
Facts about THz technology
THz technology is basically based on sending THz light towards an object and measuring how much light the object reflects and transmits. The magic happens when the object meets the THz light, through which the THz light collects unique information about the object that cannot be collected in any other way. This makes THz a widely applicable technology platform in many industrial fields.
Facts about grants
In 2022, the Otto Mønsted Foundation will again meet an increasing number of grants for conference stays after a few years characterised by the pandemic lockdowns. In 2021, the Otto Mønsted Foundation awarded grants for 179 congress and research stays abroad, and in 2022, the Otto Mønsted Foundation has so far awarded DKK 9 million to over 900 students on study abroad programmes.