Abdul Wahab Sharfo

The Dutch healthcare system is under growing pressure. An aging population, increasing treatment complexity, and a shortage of medical staƯ are creating an urgent need for smarter, more eƯicient clinical workflows. My thesis directly tackled this challenge by reimagining how HDR-brachytherapy for prostate cancer can be delivered — making it more accurate, more eƯicient, and more sustainable for the future of cancer care.

Conducted within the Qualified Medical Engineer (QME) program at the Technical University of Eindhoven and in collaboration with the radiotherapy department at the Erasmus MC, my project bridged engineering innovation and clinical practice. The goal: to optimize the HDR-brachytherapy workflow for both primary and salvage prostate cancer treatments through data-driven design and technological advancement. 

Bas Spijkerman

My name is Bas, and I am currently completing my EngD at the University of Twente, where I will finish at the end of November. During my project, I collaborated with ASML to develop modular simulation tools for acoustic finite element analysis. I greatly enjoyed working on this topic and the collaboration, and I am now excited to begin a PhD, building further on this research direction.

Bram Kok

Imagine a chip that can measure important substances in the blood circulation in real-time! My Engineering Doctorate project focused on the research, development, and optimisation of an interleukin-6 (IL-6) biosensor chip, with the aim of making it applicable to a sensor. The ultimate goal was to create a chip that could be used in a sensor capable of measuring the health of fish in real time, without disturbing their natural behaviour. This turned out to be an ambitious challenge that required knowledge from many different fields. It required knowledge from optics and materials science to chemistry and biology, and involved creating a close collaboration between different departments of Wageningen University & Research and the University of Twente.

Daniel Wondyifraw

I started this project after seeing how difficult it is for cities to turn sustainability goals into daily practice. Construction activity affects CO₂, noise, and mobility, yet many municipalities lack tools that show the full picture in real time. UDT-Den Bosch was built to explore a more practical and accessible approach by combining live data with clear insight. My hope is that this work helps cities plan more responsibly and build with the environment in mind.

Elze Swinkels

For my EngD in Qualified Medical Engineering, I had the opportunity to contribute to a project aimed at supporting health workers in low-and middle-income countries in screening for tuberculosis (TB), a leading infectious cause of death worldwide. My project addressed a major global challenge: the underdiagnosis of TB. Whilst TB is preventable and curable, one out of four people with TB is not detected, contributing to continued transmission. Current screening tools, like chest X-ray and molecular tests, are effective, but difficult to scale. By exploring the feasibility of AI-assisted TB screening using handheld ultrasound, my project laid the foundation for a novel tool aimed at improving early detection in environments where resources are scarce.

Eyob Amra

My project, “Development of a Design Framework for Mass Personalization Systems”, tackles a challenge that affects millions: how can we make technology more inclusive, adaptive, and sustainable? Today, people expect products tailored to their needs, but traditional manufacturing is rigid. This gap limits user satisfaction, excludes diversity, and creates waste.

Faezeh Ghasemi

How can a traditional, asset-heavy industry like container rental evolve into a data-driven service provider? 
At ELA Container GmbH—Europe’s market leader in modular space solutions—the challenge was not the absence of data, but its fragmentation. Valuable information was scattered across IoT devices, ERP systems, and logistics platforms, making it difficult for employees and customers to gain unified insight into operations. My goal was to design a solution that would make these data sources and the insights accessible, actionable, and human-centered. Using the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM), I developed and validated two major solutions that together form the foundation of ELA’s digital transformation journey.

Georgia Skroumpelou 

Can 3D concrete printing be part of the solution for climate change, housing crises, and labor shortages? With two design breakthroughs—a meso-scale metamaterial with bio-based cork for thermally enhanced walls and real-time local composition control linking design to 24/7 production lines and mass customization—it can. 3DCP now democratizes housing, reduces human intervention, and lowers construction’s environmental footprint. Collaborating with a transdisciplinary team, we delivered a full-scale printed wall demonstrator in under 2 years, translating research into tangible impact. Let’s improve our world, one layer at a time.

Inga Maria Giorgadze

I began this project with an idealized view of Dutch infrastructure, but engaging with the industry revealed limited digital capacity and very fragmented efforts in implementing Digital Twins. This prompted me to reflect on practical solutions, setting aside academic ideals to develop a method for pavement Digital Twins that anyone can implement using basic GIS tools. By focusing on real-world impact rather than sophisticated digital applications, the methodology I designe has been explored and received interest from road authorities, and I am now expanding it to a predictive model, demonstrating both the practical value of my work and the lessons I learned about translating innovation into practice. Seeing the potential of this methodology continues to inspire me to further refine and expand its impact.

Ivo Adriaan Tjalma 

I hereby submit my candidacy for the KIVI EngD Award 2025, based on my Individual Design Project (IDP) titled “Cultivation of Animal Proteins as Three-Dimensional Structures: Modelling and Simulation Studies.” This work reflects the core values of the EngD program: engineering excellence, real-world relevance, and interdisciplinary innovation.

 During the IDP in Bioprocess Engineering at TU Delft, I developed a conceptual process for the scalable production of structured cultivated meat using edible hollow fiber bioreactors. The project addresses a major bottleneck in cellular agriculture: the lack of scalable, costeffective technologies for producing sustainable whole-cut meat alternatives with resembling structure and quality.

Johan Bucher

Winning the KIVI EngD Award would not only honor a personal milestone it would illuminate a transformative moment for the emerging EngD program at Wageningen University & Research. Through the anticipated article in De Ingenieur, this recognition would extend far beyond individual achievement, offering a platform to showcase the strength of engineering innovation in life sciences. It would amplify the visibility of both the program and the groundbreaking technology that bridges digital engineering with plant biology.

Jorn de Vos 

RainOasis reimagines rainwater as a vital urban resource, transforming Amsterdam’s radical greening vision into a data-driven strategy for liveability and climate resilience. By integrating soil, vegetation, and climate data, the model reveals when, where, and how much water is needed to sustain urban green systems through future droughts. Co-created with the municipality, research institutes, and industry, it bridges science and policy through the Urban Drought and Green Policy Brief — now informing city regulation. RainOasis embodies the EngD mission: turning research into real-world impact for resilient, thriving cities.

Maas van Apeldoorn 

During my 10-month graduation period, I developed a simulation framework that addresses a key tooling gap in the design of self-driving laboratories (SDLs). These SDLs have the potential to accelerate sustainable energy research and other scientific domains by automating and optimizing experimental workflows. The framework will be released open-source on GitHub in 2026, extending its impact beyond DIFFER to the wider SDL research community. 

My project was awarded a cum laude distinction (9.5/10) by Eindhoven University of Technology, recognizing both its technical quality and societal relevance. I also presented my work at NWO’s ICT.OPEN conference, and a scientific publication based on the project is currently in preparation for release alongside the open-source tool.

Mahdi Mohajeri 

Turning industrial waste into value, my EngD project explored electrochemical separation of carbon monoxide — a breakthrough technology that can reduce steel-industry emissions by up to 34%. By developing a detailed process and economic model, I defined how this idea can evolve from lab concept to industrial reality. This work provides a roadmap toward cleaner production and a carbon-neutral future powered by smart engineering.

Mahsa Barghi Mehmandari 

A key contribution of this work lies in addressing a crucial gap in the Landelijke Bruggen en Sluizen standaard (LBS), the national bridge-lock standard. The existing LBS defines only a limited and incomplete set of behaviors for bridge-lock combinations. During this project, we took the initiative to define, formalize, and validate new requirements for these combined infrastructural objects. These newly defined requirements have been verified in collaboration with RWS engineers and can serve as a foundation for updating the LBS to include bridge-lock combination behaviors. This not only extends the technical outcomes of the project but also ensures its long-term impact on the standardization and maintainability of Dutch infrastructure.

Salma Rian 

I am applying for the KIVI EngD Award because my work embodies what the EngD stands for: translating science into tangible innovation, co-created with society, and built for real impact. My project, Hydra Peck, reimagines how we feed poultry in a more sustainable and circular world. Poultry farmers today face the triple challenge of rising feed prices, environmental pressure, and stricter welfare standards. Feed alone represents up to 70% of poultry production costs, majorly due to feed processing and drying. Hydra Peck, a wet-feeding system I designed during my EngD, turns this challenge into an opportunity. The system allows the safe delivery of wet feed, including industry by-products, directly to broilers. This approach cuts drying energy use, reduces CO₂ emissions, and turns side streams into nutritious animal feed.

Shachi Marthu Shanbhag 

This project explored airless drying technologies to make industrial drying more energy-efficient and sustainable. By developing models and critically assessing novel drying concepts, I identified practical solutions that can reduce CO₂ emissions and energy use in food production. The work not only advances sustainable manufacturing but also helps make responsibly produced food more accessible to society.

Till Engelhardt 

Till Engelhardt’s EngD thesis stood out internally to his supervisors, from the university and partner company alike, as well as the EngD coordinator for several reasons. His thesis combined engineering excellence, working on cutting edge technologies for sustainable and multi-use rainwater harvesting and aquifer storage, with solid technosocio-economic evaluations. Within his thesis, he showed great command of a vast range of topics required for his interdisciplinary research. This interdisciplinary approach that Till has made central to his research was greatly valuable to the project, as it allowed him to navigate between municipal, industrial and academic partners. He did not only deliver an excellent thesis, but his work also bridged sometimes conflicting visions from partners, ensuring that his final designs will be implemented in both the Netherlands and Spain. 

Valentin Bordoux 

I am honoured to apply for the KIVI EngD Award. On August 28th, 2025, I became the first EngD graduate from Wageningen University to receive the distinction cum laude. My EngD focused on advancing sustainable marine biodiversity monitoring through an AI-driven passive acoustic monitoring system, that records and analyses underwater animal sounds. My thesis, “Revealing the Sounds of the North Sea: An Integrated Passive Acoustic Monitoring System for Improved Underwater Biodiversity Sensing,” exemplifies the multidisciplinary innovation that arises when engineering and computer science meet marine ecology.