Outreach

The Binnemans Group is strongly embedded in the SIM² KU Leuven Research Cluster. SIM² KU Leuven not only communicates its results to academia and industry but is also actively involved in interacting with society and popularising its results. As such, SIM² KU Leuven is active through social media, blogging, youtube videos, promo videos, Wikipedia page improvement, local stakeholder activities, open door days, children university programmes etc. SIM² KU Leuven also has a wide network amongst journalists and regularly contributes to tv documentaries, newspaper articles, magazine articles, radio interviews etc. More information can be found through the various project and consortia websites. Some examples are shown below.

Policy Briefs

In order to communicate the results of our projects to a diversity of professional audience (academia, RTDs, industry, policy makers etc.) the Binnemans team produces Mailchimp Newsletters which cover all key items in our running projects. As such the visibility of your project and the results obtained can be drastically enhanced, leading to a much larger impact than without such a strategy. In terms of reaching EU and national Policy Makers, LIC and SIM² KU Leuven also have a lot of experience in developing Policy Briefs (either as separate files or integrated in the Newsletters) which highlight policy-relevant parts of the project. Once again, this can dramatically increase the impact of the project and/or open up new avenues for future research, innovation and demonstration.

Videos and documentaries

During the past 5 years LIC and SIM² KU Leuven have been cooperating with diverse journalists and film makers (incl. Stijn Van Baarle, StoryRunner). Together we have developed both short animation videos, highlighting the goals & results of EU projects, as well as longer documentaries broadcasted by national television. In both cases these products target a non-professional, very wide audience. The importance of this kind of outreach is being stressed more and more by the European Commission. SIM² KU Leuven recently obtained the congratulations of the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie EC Programme for its unique EU MSCA-ETN DEMETER animation video. Likewise, its ETN NEW-MINE film (Not just another brick) was a major success (> 50,000 views in two weeks).

Interviews with SOLCRIMET researchers

Dr. Siggi Wodarz works as a postdoc at SIM² KU Leuven in the context of the ERC Advanced Grant project SOLCRIMET (Binnemans). Guided by Prof. Jan Fransaer and Prof. Koen Binnemans he investigates the electrodeposition of critical metals, such as rare earths, from non-aqueous solvents in view of critical metal recovery through the use of solvometalurgy.

Zheng Li is a new SIM² KU Leuven researcher working on non-aqueous solvent extraction for the separation of critical metals in the group of Prof. Koen Binnemans (LIC: Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry). In this interview you can get to know more about this Chinese postdoc researcher.