The Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange has announced the results of competitions for joint Polish-French and Polish-German research projects. Funding was awarded to three researchers from the Faculty of Fundamental Problems of Technology.

Grants in the PHC Polonium competition are awarded to support the mobility of collaborative research teams from Poland and France. This time, 20 projects, including two from the Wrocław Tech, received money for research conducted in 2025.

Agnieszka Kazimierska, PhD has received a grant for the project ‘Combining biomechanics, biology and signal processing to improve the diagnosis of normotensive hydrocephalus’.

Its aim is to combine research from medicine, physics and biomedical engineering to identify mechanical and biological factors affecting the intracranial pressure (ICP) signal in patients with normotensive hydrocephalus (NPH).

The research will be carried out in collaboration with physicists from the SAINBIOSE laboratory in Saint-Etienne and a neurosurgeon from the University Hospital of Toulouse, who are developing biomechanical brain models and proteomic analysis methods that allow a detailed assessment of cerebral circulation dynamics in NPH patients.

In his project, Alessandro Surrente, PhD, university professor, will look at perovskite-halide semiconductors, which have recently been at the forefront of materials research.

The goal of his research project is to investigate the fundamental electronic and optical properties of perovskite-based nanocrystals, with a specific focus on the role of the size inhomogeneities and on the how the size of the nanoparticles influence the order of the optically active and optically inactive states. The former aspect has an important impact over the colour purity of the nanocrystal emission, while the latter will help shed light on the efficiency of the emission of these nanocrystals.

This research project will be conducted in collaboration with Prof. Paulina Plochocka, who is affiliated to the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory of CNRS in Toulouse, France. This collaboration is strategic to reach the goals of the project, because the use of very high magnetic fields available at this facility (up to 70 T) will help unveil the origins of the multiple resonances in the optical spectrum of perovskite nanocrystals and to identify clearly the ordering of optically active and optically inactive states.

In turn, ten people received funding as part of the competition for joint Polish-German research projects, including Krzysztof Gawarecki, PhD, professor of our university.

His project ‘Spin and orbital dynamics in electrically tunable semiconductor artificial molecules’ will be devoted to the study of the dynamics of states in InGaAs/GaAs double quantum dots (semiconductor artificial molecules).

The project is experimental and theoretical in nature. The theoretical basis will be provided by a team from the Wrocław Tech, and the experimental part will be performed by a group led by Prof Jonathan Finley from the Technical University of Munich (TUM).