Alexander Golubov of the University of Twente has been granted a prestigious mega-grant worth circa 2.5 million euro by the Russian government. The grant is intended for building a new laboratory at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, a highly reputed Russian technical university.
Golubov has been working at the University of Twente since 1998 and is affiliated with the department of Interfaces and Correlated Electron Systems of Hans Hilgenkamp. The mega-grant received by Golubov is intended to attract top-researchers from abroad and to give Russian science a boost. Golubov will receive a sum of circa 2.5 million euro, intended for building a new laboratory where research will be carried out into topological quantum phenomena in superconductive hybrid systems. The grant will be awarded for a period of three years (possibly to be extended to five years). After this period the idea is that the lab will be able to function entirely independently. Golubov will continue to work at the University of Twente, but he will be travelling to Russia frequently as a visiting professor.
Golubov says that the mega-grant that he has managed to secure is also good news for the UT. “It will give us an opportunity to make use of the lab's facilities and to permit exchanges of students and researchers.”
The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology certainly has a highly reputed name in the scientific world. Various Nobel prize winners, including Pyotr Kapitza, Igor Tamm, Andrey Sakharov, Lev Landau, Vitaly Ginzburg and Alexey Abrikosov, worked there as professors. Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, who won a Nobel prize some years ago for discovering graphene, studied there.
