Dr Sergii Pud, Assistant Professor at the University of Twente, the Netherlands, was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant of 2 million euros for a period of 5 years for his project “Actuation spectroscopy as a new label-free tool to study protein properties in real time (ProAct)” in the 2024 competition. With ProAct, Sergii wants to introduce a breakthrough approach to reveal conformational changes through understanding and measuring protein dipole moments that were previously inaccessible experimentally. He will do this at the BIOS research group by studying how proteins respond to uneven electric fields created by gold nanoelectrodes. ProAct empowers iSCAT microscopy with new modalities, opening new possibilities for studying protein behaviour and interactions at the single-molecule level.
Sergii graduated in applied physics from the Faculty of Radiophysics, Electronics and Computer Systems of the Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University (Ukraine). He than gained his PhD degree from the Research Center Julich (Forschungszentrum Jülich, Helmholtz Association, Germany) and carried two postdoctoral terms at TU Delft and Leiden University. Sergii’s research has always revolved around detection and studying single molecules using various sensing platforms: silicon nanowire field-effect transistors, solid-state nanopores, plasmonic nanopores. With his Lab-on-a-Chip tools for nanobiology group he is developing new label-free methods to detect and study single biomolecules using interferometric scattering and nanotechnology.
- ERC announcement
- UT press-release
- Some other news on ERC awardees of Ukrainian origin can be found here