Bold research ideas receive funding
Could lunar dust be turned into a radio telescope? Could magnetic bacteria clean drinking water? Could ceramics behave like an elastic?
These are just some of the ideas that 53 researchers will now be able to explore through support from the Villum Experiment Programme.
The programme is designed for ambitious research ideas with a relatively high risk of failure, but where the attempt itself may advance research and ultimately change our understanding of the world.
“Through Villum Experiment, we create room for research ideas that challenge the boundaries of what we believe is possible. They may not work, but they could also be the one wild idea that transforms an entire field - or even the world,” says Thomas Bjørnholm, Chief Scientific Officer at Villum Foundation.
The idea comes first
The projects were selected from 280 applications. The assessment process is anonymous, meaning that the review panel has no knowledge of the researchers’ backgrounds or academic track records. Instead, applications are evaluated solely on the quality and originality of the idea.
“When we remove information about the researchers’ backgrounds, we allow ideas to stand on their own merits. This increases the chances that the most innovative projects will emerge,” says Thomas Bjørnholm.
A radio telescope built from lunar dust
There is no shortage of ingenuity among this year’s projects.
One of the researchers, Rasmus Elkjær Jacobsen, will investigate whether the Moon’s own surface material can be used to 3D-print large radio antennas directly on its surface.
If lunar dust can be used as a building material, it could pave the way for future radio telescopes to be constructed directly on the Moon rather than being transported from Earth.
“The far side of the Moon is one of the quietest radio environments in the Solar System, making it possible to detect even the faintest signals from the Universe. But radio antennas are both expensive and difficult to transport. That is why it makes good sense to build them where they are needed,” says Rasmus Elkjær Jacobsen.
Magnetic bacteria at work
Another researcher, Marlene Mark Jensen, will investigate whether magnetic bacteria can be used to remove arsenic from groundwater. Arsenic in drinking water is a widespread problem because it is both toxic and difficult to remove.
“Certain types of bacteria can absorb arsenic. Our idea is to use magnetic bacteria to capture arsenic, making it easy to remove them afterwards using a magnet. If successful, this would represent an entirely new way of removing arsenic from groundwater,” says Marlene Mark Jensen.
Ceramics that can bend
Anyone who has ever dropped a coffee cup knows that ceramics break easily. But a third researcher, Apurv Dash, will investigate whether ceramics can be designed to behave more like an elastic band, meaning that they can be stretched and bent without breaking and then return to their original shape. If successful, future ceramic materials could become significantly more robust.
Among this year’s other projects are research into self-healing concrete that can repair its own cracks and rubber materials that remain soft even in extreme cold, making them suitable for use in everything from Arctic environments to future space missions.
This year's 53 Villum Experiment grant recipients have been awarded a total of DKK 129 million to test research where failure is a real possibility and risk is part of the point.
- Focuses on unorthodox research ideas in their early phase.
- Anonymous evaluation ensures that the focus is on the potential of the idea rather than the researcher’s track record.
- Granted by Villum Foundation, one of Denmark’s largest contributors to technical and scientific research.
Villum Experiment recipients 2026:
Shuting Li, Postdoc: A-choir: Acoustic Wave Detection-based Converters Synchronization in Battery Energy Storage System, DKK 2.5 million
Yuya Hayashi, Postdoc: From Genesis to Terminus: Rainbow-Painting of Extracellular Vesicles for Single-Particle Tracking, DKK 2.5 million
Alexander Snow, Postdoc: A Synthetic-Cell-Based Approach to the Structural and Biophysical Study of Small Integral Membrane Transporters, DKK 2.5 million
Duncan Sutherland, Professor: Multivalency as a patterning approach, DKK 2.5 million
Julian Merder, Postdoc: Beyond Biodiversity: How Trait Organization of Ecosystem Engineers Drives Ecosystem Resilience, DKK 2.5 million
Jakob Juul Larsen, Associate Professor: Surface NMR is an amazing tool for groundwater exploration, but cannot detect all the water - Can this be fixed? DKK 2.5 million
Lucas Gomes, Postdoc: Mapping soil microbial biogeography: Linking 3D soil architecture and eDNA to soil function, DKK 2.2 million
Kasper Urup Kjeldsen, Associate Professor: Wired Beneath the Seafloor: Hidden Networks of Microbial Electron Flow, DKK 2.5 million
Marianne Glasius, Associate Professor: An unknown source of surfactants in the Arctic environment, DKK 2.5 million
Taro Kitazawa, Associate Professor: New multi-omics approach with molecular recording to reveal cellular interaction dynamics, DKK 2.5 million
Zhiguo Su, Postdoc: Harnessing Redox Fluctuations to Remove Antimicrobial Resistance during wastewater treatment (ReMoveAMR), DKK 2.5 million
Lars Bojer Madsen, Professor: Photoemission by a vanishing electric field? DKK 2.1 million
Mogens Nicolaisen, Professor: Pangenomic2: Cross-Pangenomic Interactions Shape Drought Resilience in Barley Holobiont, DKK 2.5 million
Martin Krøyer Rasmussen, Associate Professor: Do Plants Export Environmental Toxins in Extracellular Vesicles? (ETinEV) DKK 2.5 million
Peter Balling, Professor: Understanding attosecond carrier dynamics in solids from the bottom up using trapped nanoparticles, DKK 2.5 million
Marlene Mark Jensen, Senior researcher: MagnetAR – Magnetic Bacteria for Arsenic Recovery from Groundwater, DKK 2.5 million
Kresten Yvind, Professor: Power to the PIC, DKK 2.5 million
Jan Hidding, Postdoc: Extraordinary magnetometry using fault-tolerant daisy-chaining of one million sensors, DKK 2.5 million
Aleksandr Razumov, PhD: From Randomness to Determinism in Distributed Fiber-Optic Sensing, DKK 2.5 million
Babak Vosoughi Lahijani, Assistant Professor: Ultrafast photonic computing via Brownian motion and electromechanical transduction, DKK 2.5 million
Matteo Castagnola, Postdoc: Disentangling surface-molecule interactions with entangled plasmon spectroscopy, DKK 2.5 million
Mai Winstrup, Senior researcher: A SWOT-ICE Experiment: Revealing Hidden Ice Sheet Waterways from Space, DKK 1,9 million
Paul Kempen, Associate Professor: Capturing the Molecular Point of No Return: Real-Time Liquid-Cell Electron Microscopy of Bacterial Surface Commitment, DKK 2.5 million
Michela La Bella, Postdoc: How can we make concrete structures self-healing? A multiscale and multimodal crystallographic investigation, DKK 2.4 million
Yang Liu, Postdoc: Discordant Harmony in Photonics: Quiet Microcombs via Strong Mode Coupling, DKK 2.5 million
Ming Chen, Professor: Testing the Designability of Molten-Salt Corrosion with a Digital Twin Reactor for Additively Manufactured Alloys, DKK 2 million
Apurv Dash, Postdoc: Elastic Ceramics: A New Mechanical State Beyond Brittleness, DKK 2.5 million
Long Cheng, Postdoc: Silencing the Electron: Pure Magnetic control of 2D antiferromagnets via the 'Dark' Side of Light, DKK 2.5 million
Ivano Eligio Castelli, Professor: Quasicrystals on Demand (QUASI), DKK 2.5 million
Edmund Kelleher, Associate Professor: Towards terahertz wave nano-imaging of single-bit spin textures (TWIST), DKK 2.5 million
Christian Niclaas Saggau, Postdoc: Spectrally Programmable Chip Integrated Frequency Combs for Efficient High-Capacity Data Transfer, DKK 2.5 million
Stefania Serafin, Professor: AI of Human Experience: Exploring Generative Personal Models for Multisensory Interaction, DKK 2.5 million
Birgitte Dalsgaard Larsen, Geoscience Advisor: Pressure Communication That Heals? Turning Degassing into Fault Seals for CO2 Storage, DKK 2.5 million
Rasmus Elkjær Jacobsen, Assistant Professor: 3D Printed Lunar Regolith Extremely Large Aperture Antennas for Deep Space Observations, DKK 2.5 million
Anders E. Daugaard, Professor: Water Free Pockets in Water: Turning Fermentation Broth into High Value Materials (HYDROPOC), DKK 2.5 million
Ajanta Barh, Associate Professor: Precision infrared spectroscopy reaches nanoscale (IR-nano), DKK 2.5 million
Joao Otavio de Sousa Mendes, PhD: Unlocking superionic conductivity in unconventional materials systems, DKK 2.5 million
Anne Ladegaard Skov, Professor: Suppression of crystallization in elastomers at low temperatures, DKK 2.5 million
Jef Canals-Riclot, Postdoc: Plant waste and sand based next generation K-ion batteries, DKK 2.5 million
Jakob Kibsgaard, Professor: Atomic Anchor - Stabilizing Dual- and Triple-Atom Catalysts for the Acidic Oxygen Evolution Reaction, DKK 2.3 million
Neri Bonciani, Postdoc: Unseen but persistent: Can low-concentration discharges create arsenic hotspots on the seafloor? DKK 2.4 million
Urvish Trivedi, Assistant Professor: DISARM: Anti-virulence gene drives to convert pathogens into commensals, DKK 2.5 million
Jonas Stenløkke Madsen, Associate Professor: Chromosome derived eccDNA in Prokaryotes: A Missing Mechanism of Epigenetic Diversification? DKK 2.4 million
Julien Colombani, Postdoc: The role of 3D organ folding in sustaining tissue homeostasis and repair, DKK 2.5 million
Jonathan Donhauser, Assistant Professor: Rewriting ecosystem carbon budgets with genome-calibrated soil microbial enzyme kinetics – EcoKin, DKK 2.5 million
Julius Kirkegaard, Tenure track Assistant Professor: The Computational Confocal Microscope: Gaussian Splatting at the Microscale? DKK 2.1 million
Michael Pittelkow, Professor: Carbon Nano-belts, DKK 2.5 million
Alexander Byth Carstens, Assistant Professor: Another way out - Expanding our catalog of viral lifestyles, DKK 2.5 million
Bahman Taherkhani, Postdoc: Shape Changing Soft-Stiff Composites Through Mechanical Instabilities, DKK 2.5 million
Abhishek Tiwari, Associate Professor: Is Correctness Necessary? An Experiment in Test-Free Program Repair, DKK 2.5 million
Mirabbos Khujamberdiev, Professor: CatDPO: Machine Learning-Accelerated Exploration of Catalytic Double Perovskite Oxynitrides, DKK 2.4 million
Babukrishna Maniyadath, Postdoc: Contact Codes in Stem Cell Niches: Decoding Immune-Progenitor Interfaces as Instructors of Cell Fate, DKK 2.5 million
Hooman Farkhani, Associate Professor: QUANTRONIC: Spintronic Pseudo-Qubits for Room-Temperature Quantum Computing, DKK 2.2 million
