Prof. Dr. Seda Keskin Qualified for ERC Support Once Again

Prof. Seda Keskin Avcı from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, who was the first women researcher from Türkiye to receive ERC Starting Grant in the field of engineering with her project "COSMOS: Computational Simulations of MOFs for Gas Separations" in 2017, was awarded a €2 Million ERC Consolidator Grant this time with her project "STARLET - Atomistic Modeling of Advanced Porous Materials for Energy, Environmental and Biomedical Applications." STARLET  is the first project from Türkiye to receive Consolidator Support in the field of process engineering (PE8).

STARLET focuses on discovering and designing the most suitable materials for clean energy storage, capture of toxic gases, combating global warming, and cancer treatment by evaluating the properties of porous materials (metal-organic lattice structures-MOF) to store and transport guest molecules at the atomic level, combining atomistic calculations (a computational approach used to understand or simulate the behavior of matter at the atomic and molecular level), molecular simulations, machine learning algorithms, data science and experiments to unlock its potential in environmental and biomedical applications.

The groundbreaking achievements of Prof. Keskin Avcı’s project include the creation of the world's first database on the guest storage and transport properties of millions of porous materials; the evaluation of new technologies through accurate material-application matching; and the creation of design guidelines for high-performance materials to accelerate the discovery of new materials.

With this latest addition, Koç University now boasts an impressive total of 28 out of 50 ERC Grants in Türkiye, distributed across 17 Principal Investigators (PIs).

https://mysite.ku.edu.tr/skeskin/

https://erc.ku.edu.tr/