Looking back to 3 days wonderful expericence at Science is Wonderful in Brussels. We (Shan, Jasmijn, Maiko and Erik) are completely exhausted after these 3 days, but had great fun. Talking to all the kids (~4500) and teachers/parents that visited our booth, having a meet and greet with the EU-Commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva, doing some video-shoots for the ERC-website and taking part in a visit at the European Parlement; it was all worth the effort. Below you can see some highlights/

Today is the first day of Science is Wonderful in Brussels. It is a science fair for schoolkids in the age of 7 to 17, which is organised by the EU. It will run for 3 days and in total around 4500 youngsters will visit. We have a booth showcasing the research we are doing on concrete and specifically the work in the ERC-project MAGICON. The Magicon team is represented by Jasmijn, Shan, Maiko and Erik. It is great fun explaining what concrete is, how you make it and break it again, and of course giving examples how to make it more sustainable,

Today we had our kick-off meeting of the MAGICON project.

Did you maybe also ask yourself.... WHAT IS THE STRENGTH OF CONCRETE? 

Today we had a short informal online Magicon get together before our real kick-off meeting on January 6.

The tools to build a humidity chamber for our nano-indenter (and possibly also for the CT-scanner) arrived and are un-packed. Now we can start playing.

The MAGICON project is selected to be showcased at the Science is Wonderful event in Brussels, March 18-20, 2026. Our team will there to present the project to around 2000 young people in the age 7-18 years. This will be a lot of fun!

MAGICON is for sure an international project. We have team-members coming from 7 different countries. Do you recognize all the flags?

Today two team-members are announced. These are Kangtai Yan (Dan) and Arpan Adhikari; They will be two PhD's in the project working both mainly on the experimental part of the project. Both will start on January 1st , 2026. More info on their background you can find on the TEAM-page. Next week we will introduce more team-members.

All the open positions are filled. We are looking forward to welcome our team-members. Soon we will announce their names.

The 4 PhD-positions are also advertised now on the TU-Delft-job-opening site and they will also appear on Academic transfer and linkedin.

For the project we are looking for 1 PostDoc and 4 PhD students. The topics are defined in the TEAM-page. Note that all of these positions are fully paid with a temporary position as employee at TU-Delft.