Horizon Europe

HVL is currently participating in these ongoing Horizon Europe projects.

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions - Postdoctoral Fellowships at HVL

HVL is aiming at increasing its participation in Horizon Europe and we are always looking for new opportunities for cooperation.

Thanks to our strong links within the local and regional ecosystems in Western Norway and our capacity to engage with various stakeholders from the public and private sectors as well as the civil society, we want to contribute to new knowledge, innovative solutions and policy development to address the current and future societal challenges from a sustainable perspective.

The SENSE. project seeks to develop the ‘New European Roadmap to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Maths) Education’, addressing the learning continuum from school to work life. The consortium, coordinated by HVL, includes 17 partner organisations across 14 different European countries that will establish 13 ‘STEAM Labs’ across Europe. The project was launched in September 2022, and it is due to run until 2025.

Europe needs more young people to take up careers in science-related sectors. According to the European Skills Agenda only “one in five young people graduates from STEM in tertiary education” and only half as many women as man. Europe also needs a science-literate society and a skilled workforce to successfully tackle global environmental challenges, to make informed use of digital technologies and to counteract disinformation and fake news campaigns.

SENSE. seeks to increase the public’s interest in science by merging the arts and aesthetics into STEM education, reshaping how STEM subjects are taught in Europe. Funded by Horizon Europe, the European Union’s research and innovation programme, the consortium of 17 members represents 14 European countries. Members consist of formal and informal education institutions, research, businesses, policymakers and NGOs; member specialisms include sustainability, gender sensitivity, digitisation, health, work readiness, arts and design as well as life-long learning.

The project will develop an accessible educational roadmap promoting socially conscious and scientifically literate citizens and professionals. It addresses outdated perceptions of current science education as well as gender stereotypes by integrating the arts, social inclusion and spatial design as its core components. SENSE. will establish 13 ‘STEAM Labs’ across Europe to develop and evaluate the ‘SENSE. approach’ to STEAM subjects alongside students, educators, teachers, businesses and other stakeholders.

The ‘New European Roadmap to STEAM Education’ will take the shape of a STEAM learning companion to support tomorrow’s educators and learners – be it in the classroom, in a museum or on a drilling rig. A digital hub will be established, where practitioners from all ages and backgrounds across Europe will be able to access tried and tested educational practices to increase engagement within these subjects.

Coordinator: Lydia Schulze Heuling

More info: www.sense-steam.eu

The OCEAN project is focused on enhancing operator awareness in navigation, to reduce the frequency of severe accidents like collision and grounding, to mitigate ship-strike risks to marine mammals, and to mitigate the risk presented by floating obstacles to ships. The project will contribute to an improved understanding of accident root causes, and will strive to reduce the resulting human, environmental and economic losses through socio-technical innovations supporting ship navigators.

Around 3.000 maritime incidents occur every year in the European maritime fleet. 28% of these accidents are categorised as severe or very severe accidents, resulting in the loss of life onboard, pollution, fire, collisions or grounding. Navigational accidents are dominant in these statistics according to the European Maritime Safety Agency, be it for cargo, passenger or service ships.

The OCEAN project ambition is to contribute to the mitigation of navigational accidents by supporting the navigators to do an even better job than they do presently. The OCEAN consortium will address the most pertinent factors that may contribute to events becoming accidents: training, technical, human or organisational factors, operational constraints, processes and procedures, commercial pressures, and will recommend improvements and amendments to regulations, standards and bridge equipment design approaches.

OCEAN seeks to enhance navigational awareness “on the spot” and to improve the performance of evasive manoeuvring to avoid collision with near-field threats. The project will deliver and demonstrate several human centred innovations. For example, the 4D Situation Awareness Display which will be developed in the OCEAN project will improve the visualisation of navigational hazards, integrating current bridge information systems with marine mammal and lost floating containers detection and tracking capacity specifically developed by the project.

Going further, the project will design and implement a European navigational hazard data infrastructure to feed multi-source observations and hazard predictions relating to floating containers and large aggregations of marine mammals into the existing distributed maritime warning infrastructure. OCEAN seeks to transfer this data ecosystem to relevant European organisations for deployment and maintenance.

Co-funded by Horizon Europe, the European Union’s research and innovation programme, the consortium of 13 members represents 7 European countries, Norway, Greece, Spain, Denmark, Portugal, Ireland and UK, all located on major European coastal regions. Members include a coastal administration, a ship operator, maritime safety and transport researchers, marine mammal ecology and conservation experts, companies specialised in maritime information systems and sensors, a professional organisation, a risk and safety management organisation, as well as data infrastructure, data fusion and satellite imaging specialists. UK participants are supported by UK Research and Innovation Grant Number 10038659 (Lloyd’s Register) and Grant Number 10052942 (The Nautical Institute).

The project launched in October 2022 and is scheduled to run for three years.

Coordinator: Erik Styhr Petersen

More info: www.ocean-navigation-awareness.eu (site under construction)

Optimized Nanofluids for Efficient Solar Thermal Energy Production

Contact

Boris Balakin

Assistant Head of Department

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101059639

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is widely used in plastics and textiles leading to over 20 Mt/y of complex waste worldwide for which no closed-loop recycling is viable today. Most complex waste is landfilled or incinerated. There is an urgent need to develop a circular solution to convert complex PET wastes from plastics and textiles back into high-added value products.

WHITECYCLE aims to demonstrate two new processes combining strong scientific and industrial know-how: (i) innovative identification, sorting and separation technologies that will dramatically increase the PET content of complex waste streams to 80%, and (ii) a disruptive enzymatic recycling process that is expected to yield pure PET monomers sustainably even for impure waste streams. Process design kits, LCA and production cost estimates will be provided to PET manufacturers and waste management companies for rapid deployment and assure social acceptance.

First projections show that WHITECYCLE’s recycled PET will be competitive with virgin PET. The project will conduct a full circle loop from real complex waste feedstock to representative product of the 3 use-cases at TRL 5. Then, a strong upscale study will allow the process steps to reach TRL 6 to 8. By 2030, WHITECYCLE will enable the annual recycling of more than 2 Mt of PET, which corresponds to the amount of additional recycled PET needed to meet the EU’s 2030 targets. This will reduce emissions by around 2.06 Mt CO2eq and avoid the landfilling of more than 1.8 Mt of PET.

Project leader: Valeria Jana Schwanitz

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101060918

Given technological developments in other domains and lessons from the pandemic, there is a strong push to invest in technology-augmented education. However, much remains unknown; for example, what technological abilities are useful in education, how they can be deployed, what training needs arise, and what shape future policies governing this should take. EMPOWER contributes to resolving these questions by developing novel technological support for the education of children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs).

This use case is, in many ways challenging, and thus ideally suited to 1) make a positive impact on the educational needs of these children, and 2) highlight the potential and limitations of technology-augmented education in a way that can inform future developments generally. NDDs affect approximately 15% of children aged 3 to 17 years. These children can experience difficulties with language and speech, motor skills, behaviour, memory, learning, or other neurological functions and benefit from education tailored to their needs.

The core output of EMPOWER is an educational platform, co-created by all involved stakeholders, that facilitates the improvement of these key skills in children with NDDs. The platform will be tested and evaluated in school settings with all stakeholders involved according to the strict standards of a randomized clinical trial. In addition to technological advances, the lessons learned from the development and deployment of this platform will provide valuable insights into the needs and possibilities for training teachers in the use of new technologies.

Project leader: Ilona Heldal

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101095292

DocTalent4EU aims to enhance PhD employability through a strong, visible and innovative recognition-system of the most in-demand transferable skills (relying on the ESCO framework) that early-career researchers (ECRs) acquire or will acquire through their doctoral training and research activities.

The consortium will adopt a multi-actor approach involving non-academic stakeholders (e.g. public authorities, industries or business) to improve transferable skills training and to develop local talent management centres. The project will also develop a new prototype based on machine learning to support ESCO in continuously updating and predicting the most in-demand skills on the labour market concerning the 8 EQF level, according to the expected skills from job offer collections.

Project manager: Heidi Skramstad

PIONEERED – Pioneering policies and practices tackling educational inequalities in Europe

The PIONEERED project will specify research-informed policy standards and identify innovative policies and practices to reduce inequalities in accessing education. The project will identify emerging and existing sources of educational inequalities from early childhood to tertiary education, design pioneering policies and practices of reaction, incorporate the findings, and determine the most adaptable instruments and innovative policies to apply across Europe.

PIONEERED will analyse national policies addressing inequalities, analyse new and existing relevant data, and conduct research in schools and informal education centres.

More info: https://www.pioneered-project.eu/

Project leader

Solvejg Jobst

Head of PhD programme

The RiskGone project addresses the need for a new framework for risk governance for engineered nanomaterials. The project will recommend adjustments to current guidelines and develop nano-specific guidance documents for the risk assessment of ENMs.

It will evaluate, optimise and pre-validate standard operating procedures and test guidelines and integrate them into a framework for risk governance. Relying on current strategies for risk assessment of conventional chemicals, this new framework will comprise modular tools, taking into account ethical aspects and societal risk perception.

More info: https://riskgone.eu/

Project manager: Emil.Cimpan

INTREPID HEI – International Capacity Building in InNovation, Transfer and Entrepreneurship with focus on ShaRed Expertise in Higher Education Institutions

The project aims at developing international digital offers for start-ups, students, and (non-)academic staff in the competence fields of innovation and entrepreneurship. INTREPID-HEI is supported by EIT Urban Mobility, an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT).

More info: https://intrepid-hei.eu/

Project leader

Øyvind Midtbø Berge

Vice-Dean for Innovation and Regional Development

Does standardization matter? Evaluating the potential of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) for reducing employment discrimination faced by immigrants.

More info: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101065566

Contact: Edit Bugge

More info: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101062953

Contact: Wendy Guan Zhen Tan

HVL is Associated Partner in the MSCA Doctoral Network project LABDA.

More info: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101072993

HVL is a Third Party in the StoRIES project.

More info: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101036910

RRI2SCALE - Responsible Research and Innovation Ecosystems at Regional Scale for Intelligent Cities, Transport and Energy

More info: https://rri2scale.eu/

Lars Martel Antoine Coenen

I do research on the geography of responsible innovation and sustainability transitions. What makes places stand out or lag behind in their ability to innovate, especially when it comes to grand societal challenges such as climate change and social inclusion? In my work, I have developed and applied different theoretical perspectives cutting across a range of disciplines and the boundaries of research, policy and practice.

EERAdata - Towards a FAIR and open data ecosystem in the low carbon energy research community

More info: https://www.eeradata.eu/

Coordinator

Valeria Jana Schwanitz

I am an energy economist with ample experience in energy system modelling. I also work with empirical analysis of human-nature interactions and how they are impacted by climate change and sustainable development. Currently I am researching citizen-led projects and innovation in the green energy transition in Europe.