The Areas of Advance Award has been presented since 2010. The award was established in order to highlight Chalmers initiatives where interdisciplinary collaboration contributes to solving the big challenges of the future and strives towards a sustainable society.
The award is specifically aimed at challenge-driven interdisciplinary collaborations in research, education and innovation with the potential to make a real difference on the way to a more sustainable society. Particular importance is attached to collaborations that manage to straddle traditional disciplinary boundaries and have substantial existent or potential public benefit.
Area of Advance Award 2024
The Areas of Advance award has been granted to Malgorzata Zboinska, Cecilia Geijer, and Tiina Nypelö for their groundbreaking collaboration that merges design and natural sciences.
The three awardees come from different fields: Malgorzata Zboinska from Architecture and Civil Engineering, Cecilia Geijer from Life Sciences, and Tiina Nypelö from Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. They have collaborated on developing building materials from yeast and recycled biomass – an idea that took off thanks to Chalmers' strength areas.
"A few years ago, Malgorzata approached me at an Areas of Advance seminar and wanted to collaborate, which I naturally agreed to. We also needed Tiina, who is a materials chemist, to complete the team," says Cecilia Geijer.
Malgorzata Zboinska was the one who came up with the original project idea.
"As an architect who researches, it is truly rewarding to contribute knowledge that brings us closer to becoming a bio-based society with buildings that have less impact," she says.
Yeast is a natural biomass, just like most other cultivated biomasses, and can be refined into various materials.
"We wanted to take yeast, which is mainly used for food production and similar purposes today and use it as a new biomass source for materials," says Tiina Nypelö.
Yeast itself is not a particularly stable material to build with. But when mixed with, for example, cellulose fibers – in this case from forest materials – and other substances that bind the components together, something happens.
"We create new recipes, new combinations of bio-based raw materials, to create new materials. Before this collaboration, I never thought of yeast as a material, but as a catalyst for making wine or bread or biochemicals. But now we use the yeast's composition and how it can interact with the other components to create a stable structure," says Cecilia Geijer.
Cecilia Geijer explains that a future scenario is to cultivate yeast on industrial waste, for example from the pulp and paper industry, to use more of the carbon atoms already circulating within the industry – a more climate-smart way to produce materials.
Cultivating yeast also does not require large land areas and is not season-dependent like other crops.
"In this way, our process becomes a complement to existing biomass production," says Cecilia Geijer.
Malgorzata Zboinska envisions that the material can be used in the future as a sustainable alternative to fossil-based building materials such as gypsum, plastic, and cement.
"It can, for example, become a cladding material for walls and ceilings. But also function as a surface layer or filler for renovation and restoration and repair of aged or damaged wooden building components. We have already demonstrated such applications in our first 3D-printed models and prototypes. Right now, we are also developing a full-scale demonstration of a wall panel system where the panels are 3D-printed from the yeast material," she says.
The trio sees the collaboration across disciplinary boundaries as the key to moving the project forward.
"Normally, Cecilia and I would have thought about this from our usual perspectives; how the yeast behaves and whether the material is stable enough. But the exciting thing about collaborating with Malgorzata and her group is that they see materials with different eyes and, as here, find new applications within architecture," says Tiina Nypelö.
Malgorzata Zboinska agrees.
"The driving force in our collaboration is the synergy between the disciplines. Chemistry and biology work under the microscope, on the micro and even nanoscale, while we in architecture work on the macroscale with what is visible and tangible. It is a strength that we can coordinate our areas of knowledge to develop something that will eventually be applicable to reduce the built environment's climate impact," she says.
She continues:
"The individual disciplines alone could not have achieved the result; it required the three of us together to come up with something meaningful. I truly appreciate having Cecilia and Tiina with me and admire their openness to my ideas, which initially might have seemed a bit abstract.
In the same way, she also sees Chalmers' work with strength areas as a great asset.
"I think it is a sign that Chalmers recognises unconventional research synergies; it is not entirely expected that architects can collaborate with chemists and biologists to achieve something together – but we have shown that it is both possible and fruitful. It feels good to receive such recognition for our efforts!