n 25.08.22 – Dr Mostapha Dakhchoune, a former EPFL SB graduate, was awarded the Schmidt Science Fellowship to pursue postdoctoral research.
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The Schmidt Science Fellows program awards every year around 30 promising scientists from select institutions with a 100k USD annual stipend to support up to two years of postdoctoral research. The program awards strictly scientists who wish to pivot from their field of expertise toward an entirely new topic, aiming at “identifying, developing, and amplifying the next generation of science leaders, building a community of scientists and supporters of interdisciplinary science, and leveraging this network to drive sector-wide change”.

The Schmidt program was launched in 2017 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt (former Google CEO) in partnership with the Rhodes Trust. Dr Dakhchoune is only the second EPFL graduate to receive this prestigious fellowship, after Dr Mina Konakovic-Lukovic in 2019.

During his PhD, Dakhcoune’s research tackled the amount of energy and resources wasted in separating chemicals in industrial processes by developing next-generation membranes to replace current energy-intensive technologies. As a Schmidt Science Fellow, he plans to pivot from engineering to chemistry to understand molecular motion at an angstrom scale increasing chemical reaction rates to be able to benefit people’s lives at the everyday scale by lowering the production cost of common goods.

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