“I am extremely honored and happy,” says Helena Rodilla, Associate Professor at the Division of Terahertz and Millimetre Wave Laboratory, who is now receiving a consolidator grant from the Swedish Research Council of SEK 10 million for her project on Terahertz spectroscopy of proteins in solution.
It was only last week that the list of approved consolidator grants within natural and engineering sciences from the Swedish Research Council was made official. Out of the 119 applications that had been handed in, a total of nine grants were approved, two of which go to researchers active at Chalmers University of Technology. One of the very pleased recipients is Helena Rodilla, Associate Professor at the Division of Terahertz and Millimetre Wave Laboratory at the Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience. And for her, the good news came as a surprise, to say the least.
“I am extremely honored and happy. I honestly didn’t expect it. I got the news from a friend that congratulated me after seeing my name on the list. I got so nervous that I could not even find the call resolution. My friend had to send me a screen shot of the list,” says Helena.
For many years, she has been researching techniques to be able to probe the movement of proteins in the picosecond time scale in liquid. By doing this, the hope is to provide a method to understand how the structure of proteins is connected to their function in enzymes.
“This grant is a fantastic opportunity as it provides certain level of security in terms of funding to address this challenging project idea,” says Helena Rodilla.
The research field has been dealing with some technological challenges that come with generating and detecting terahertz waves, and to the fact that water absorbs terahertz waves strongly, among other things.
“Moreover, there are many overlapping vibrations that make it hard to resolve specific spectroscopic features. Most progress so far has used terahertz time-domain spectroscopy on proteins in artificial forms to avoid water absorption, but this affects the proteins movements and the study of enzyme reactions,” she says.
The total grant amount awarded by the Swedish Research Council is more than SEK 82 million and for Helena, the funding means that she will be able to invest SEK 10 million into the project.
“To overcome these challenges, in this project we plan to use the latest terahertz technology and techniques used for space and atmospheric sciences and combine it with aligning methods of proteins in liquid.”
For more information about the consolidator grants from the Swedish Research Council 2024
- Associate Professor, Terahertz and Millimetre Wave Laboratory, Microtechnology and Nanoscience