Millions of Funding for National Research Infrastructures
The Department of Chemistry receives funding from The Research Council of Norway for robotisation in chemical experimentation.
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- Most of the new funding will go towards purchasing equipment, specifically more robots, which are used to automate laboratory processes. This is the way forward for chemical experimentation, especially in a high-cost country like Norway. The robots can work continuously, day and night, enabling us to conduct many more experiments so that we can quickly determine what works best, says Professor Bengt Erik Haug at the Department of Chemistry.
He is the project leader for the new national infrastructure platform Norwegian Open Laboratory for High-Throughput Experimentation and Scale-up (NorHTE), which will be led from UiB with NTNU as a partner – with Professor John de Mello as node leader. The platform will offer state-of-the-art robotic facilities to both academic and industrial researchers in chemistry and related sciences, to efficiently conduct long experimental and production series with a high degree of reproducibility.
The platform will also enable Norwegian researchers to quickly produce larger quantities of interesting substances and materials, so that these can be examined in test systems that require larger amounts than we usually work with in the laboratory.
The Future Itself
To demonstrate what HTE technology is, Professor Haug takes us to the local HTE@UiB laboratory at the science building, Realfagbygget. Here, chemists work to automate laboratory processes to harness the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to conduct experiments and interpret data.
- Through machine learning and artificial intelligence, the robots can drive themselves forward and determine what is optimal – whether it is a product or a reaction condition. This is the future itself, and it is what we really want to exploit with the new national infrastructure. There, we will conduct this type of experiment on a large scale, says Haug.
He emphasises that the infrastructure will contribute to important innovation that can create jobs in Norway, especially within health innovation, by creating molecules that can be tested on biological problems. His research group is working, among other things, to discover new types of antibiotics.
- We can also use this machine to produce new materials, new catalysts, and new substances that can form the basis for new diagnostic and therapeutic drugs. We will not make the drugs themselves here, but we will work on the innovation behind them, says Haug.
Robotisation also involves building a facility that can be controlled from anywhere, so that we actually can conduct experiments without being in the laboratory. This will provide good access for national users and even facilitate international collaboration. The Department of Chemistry collaborates with professors working on similar experimentation in Canada and has hired a Professor II from the University of British Colombia, and a Professor II from the University of Ottawa.
Big Win for UiB
- In this year's allocation for national research infrastructures, UiB has secured a big win. The allocation to NorHTE announced today, is the culmination of a process that has lasted almost ten years. An important reason for our success now, is that we have used these years to build up a professional environment and build up competence. The infrastructure we are now receiving funds for represents a technological leap for us, and will contribute to the robotisation of the field, says Professor Knut Børve at the Department of Chemistry.
Børve held the position of Head of Department at the Department of Chemistry from January 2016 to the end of 2023. To explain the work behind the funding, he draws a staircase on the chalkboard, where each step represents the effort put in on the way to today's allocation from The Research Council of Norway– from the department, further to the faculty and central level at UiB, and finally to national funding. He confirms that the path to these funds has been a central part of the department's strategy and work over many years.
– The Department of Chemistry has achieved this by initially laying the very first stones, before we received additional infrastructure funds from the faculty. And then, crucially, we received about four million NOK from UiB's central administration for the development of HTE @ UiB. This means that if the UiB's central administration does not have the opportunity to provide funding for medium-sized infrastructure, the opportunity to compete for the large funds and the large infrastructures will also be lost. In this case, we received the support. And the result today is that we have secured a project worth about 100 million, says Børve.
Two-thirds of these funds go to UiB, and one-third to our collaboration partner NTNU.
– It is a great event to get this equipment in place and provide infrastructure that can address today's global challenges in a really good way. This is a big deal, concludes Head of Department Magne Olav Sydnes at the Department of Chemistry.
MatNat with Four out of Five UiB Allocations
In the allocation from the Ministry of Education, there were several pieces of good news for the academic environments at the faculty. Four of the faculty's total of 11 applications were approved.
- EPOS-NG – Research Infrastructure for Geohazards, led by Mathilde Sørensen, Department of Earth Science.
- ELIXIR Norway – Data infrastructure for bioinformatics, led by Sushma Grellscheid, CBU/Department of Informatics.
- NORMAR-II – Upgrade of the ROV Ægir 6000, led by Rolf Birger Pedersen, Centre for Deep Sea Research/ Department of Earth Science.
- NorHTE - Chemical experiments with machine learning, led by Bengt Erik Haug, Department of Chemistry.
– This is really good news! The allocation of four national research infrastructures to the faculty is incredibly important for strengthening our strong research environments, says Dean Gunn Mangerud at the Faculty of Science and Technology.
–The four allocations support fields that are important strategically important to us and our partners, and include marine research, geohazards, bioinformatics, and chemical discoveries. Three of them build on already existing important national infrastructure, while NorHTE is the first of its kind in Norway, says Mangerud.
In addition to the four projects led by the faculty, the faculty is a partner in four more research infrastructure projects.
- Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS) Norway and Ocean Thematic Centre (OTC), phase 3.
- Infrastructure for Norwegian Earth System modelling phase 2 (INES2)
- Swiss-Norwegian Beamlines (SNBL) at ESRF 2025-2028
- E-INFRA 2023 - A National e-infrastructure for Science