ERC 2025 Advanced Grant awarded to Visiting Professor Raf Dewil

ERC Advanced Grants, part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, are awarded to individual researchers for five years and are worth up to €3.5 million. They enable senior researchers to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects with the potential to lead to major scientific breakthroughs.

Raf Dewil, Full Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at KU Leuven and Visiting Professor in the Department of Engineering Science since June 2022, has been awarded a €2.5 million ERC Advanced Grant for STELLAR (Sense-Capture-Destroy-Regenerate): A multi-stimuli molecular strategy for autonomous removal of emerging micropollutants from wastewater.

“Clean water is one of society’s most fundamental needs, yet it is increasingly threatened by pollutants that are invisible, persistent and extremely difficult to remove”

Wastewater increasingly contains trace concentrations of harmful chemicals that are difficult to remove using current treatment technologies, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, often called “forever chemicals”) and pharmaceuticals. Rather than developing yet another passive filtration material, STELLAR aims to create smart materials that detect pollutants and respond autonomously. These materials will recognise specific contaminants, capture and break them down, and then regenerate so they can be reused, making water treatment more effective and energy-efficient.

To achieve this, Professor Dewil’s team will combine advanced materials with machine learning and 4D printing, which enables structures to change shape and function over time in response to their environment. The project will investigate how these materials respond to different triggers—including the pollutants themselves, light and changes in pH—and how those responses can improve contaminant removal in real-world wastewater. Although the immediate goal is cleaner water, the knowledge gained could also advance chemical manufacturing, environmental sensing and other sustainable technologies.

Professor Dewil says, “What motivates me is the possibility of turning ambitious fundamental research into entirely new ways of protecting our water resources. With STELLAR, we want to rethink how water-treatment technologies work and create the scientific foundations for systems that are more intelligent, efficient and sustainable. The ERC Advanced Grant gives us the freedom to take that risk and pursue ideas that could ultimately make a real difference to the environment.”

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 101267679).