Dr. Alberto Noronha, Post-doc at the University of Luxembourg, was the winner of the Falling Walls Lab Luxembourg 2018 on Friday, 1 June 2018. He competed successfully against sixteen other innovators from in- and outside Luxembourg, who came to pitch their ideas at the prestigious event.
The Falling Walls Lab aims at promoting exceptional ideas and at connecting promising scientists and entrepreneurs from all fields. Labs are organised at academic institutions across the world each year to identify the region’s most innovative minds. The winners of the locally organised Labs (100 in total) get a ticket to the Lab Finals in Berlin, where they have the opportunity to convince a renowned jury of their ground-breaking ideas once again and can be awarded the title “Falling Walls Young Innovator of the Year”.
Alberto Noronha will represent Luxembourg at the Finals on 8 November 2018. His research, carried out at the Luxembourg Centre of Systems Biomedicine, addresses the problem of diseases associated with unhealthy diets by a personalised nutrition approach that involves the examination of health-related markers. Currently, he is working on making this idea marketable for his startup “Nutriomix”, supported by the University of Luxembourg Incubator.
Three other ideas impressed the jury, composed of experts from academia and business as well as the audience filling the auditorium on Belval Campus, eager to discover the solutions to today’s challenges. Two of these ideas provide the basis for startups, equally supported by the University’s Incubator:
Second prize: Dr. Megha Agrawal (University of Cambridge/ IIT Bombay), received the second prize for her work to develop an affordable and effective solution to close the open duct in the heart of babies born with heart diseases, thus helping to reduce the death rate of those children.
Third prize: Dr. Jorge Augusto Meira (Post-doc at Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust, startup project “Datalics”) has developed a concept to reduce the number of cost-intensive unscheduled aircraft maintenance, affecting in average 2.5% of the total take-offs.
Fourth prize: Mara Kroth (Bachelor in Psychology, University of Luxembourg, startup project “Silver Valley”), awarded for working on a platform that gives retired people access to a like-minded community and a variety of activities, counteracting the feelings of loneliness every second person in retirement reports.
Host of the Falling Walls Lab was Dr. Pranjul Shah (LCSB) who won the last Falling Walls Lab Luxembourg in 2015 with his project HuMiX. With view to its success, he is confident that the University will organise a Lab through the University of Luxembourg Incubator as well next year: “The response to the promotion of the event was very high in the Greater Region. Yet, not only the number of applications received, as well the level of ideas presented encourages us to repeat the Falling Walls Lab Luxembourg next year. Meanwhile, we wish the best of luck to Alberto Noronha, who will do a great job in representing Luxembourg at the finals in Berlin in November.”