PhD student Javier Marmolejo awarded prestigious grant

Hej, Javier! How does it feel to be awarded this grant?

Javier Marmolejo: Above all, I feel grateful and happy that I will be able to carry out this new project. I'm also excited, and slightly nervous, to make it happen.

What will the money be used for?

Javier: The award will be used to extend our previous experiments regarding optically levitating droplets to the infra-red light region. As the droplets evaporate, they twinkle in a "Comb pattern" rich with information about the material.

Extending this with a tunable IR laser will help us towards our goal to perform fast chemical analyses in tiny, levitated droplets.

Finally, it is fairly unusual for PhD students to get grants like this. Do you have any advice on how to succeed?

Javier: Apply to everything! That has always been my supervisor Dag Hanstorps's advice to me. On top of that, I think it helped me a lot to have my own side project and to find applications for it.

Learn more about The Märta and Eric Holmberg Endowment here