Da Vinci Project
The Da Vinci project is an interdisciplinary honours programme on sustainability for 2nd- and 3rd-year Bachelor’s students who are looking for an extra challenge.
Sustainability challenges
Do you want to meet people from different backgrounds, look across disciplinary boundaries and collaborate outside your comfort zone? Are you willing to try new things and want to work together in interdisciplinary teams on real-life sustainability related challenges with the involvement of important stakeholders? And above all, are you not afraid to fail? Then the new Da Vinci Project might be interesting for you!
Construct a prototype
Throughout the programme you use Design Thinking as a method to find solutions for the different challenges. Through an active learning-by-doing approach, you will be trained to collaborate transdisciplinary, thereby broadening your horizon. You will acquire new skills for life hard to acquire in a normal academic environment. To finish this programme successfully, you construct a solution, or prototype, together with your team members. On top of that the students take part in interactive lectures, or college tours, by sustainability experts from various areas of research and expertise from within and outside of the UU.
Further information is available at the bottom of the page.
Descartes College
The Descartes College offers interdisciplinary honours courses for Bachelor’s students in Dutch. These courses differ from other honours courses due to their broad nature, covering various fields. The Descartes courses enable you to see how your own discipline relates to others. You will discuss topics with fellow students and teachers from other specialisations. Each course reflects upon the academic disciplines from a different perspective. You can take the honours courses in your second and third year of your Bachelor’s degree. The language of the courses is Dutch.
Application and the selection process
Students who are motivated and have a broad interest in different topics can sign up for selection for the Descartes College at the end of the first year of their Bachelor’s programme. Are you already an honours student? In that case you do not need to take part in the selection process and you can sign up directly (each semester) for one or more courses of the Descartes College.
More information
For more information and course offerings contact the Descartes College team at descartescollege@uu.nl, or scroll to the bottom to the page (in Dutch).
Syllabus Catalysis Course (SK-BKATA)
Catalysis is everywhere!
Catalysts can be found in our body (enzymes are essential to life), in a gasoline-driven car (for exhaust gas purification), in washing powder (to help break down food residues on dirty clothes) and in chemical, food and process industries (no fuel, plastic, beer, bread or wine without the proper catalysts). Catalysis is also one of the key technologies required to drive the current energy, feedstock and circularity transitions demanded by the urgent need to transition to a more sustainable society. New catalysts are, for example, needed to make chemical building blocks, materials and fuels from more sustainable sources of carbon, such as biomass, municipal waste or CO2, or to achieve end-of-life circularity, e.g. by recycling plastics.
The aim of this course is to expand your understanding of chemical transformations and of substances, which can catalyze such transformations. The focus is on various types of catalysis, in particular molecular catalysis (bio- and homogeneous catalysis) and heterogeneous catalysis, and also the kinetics of catalytic processes. Together with a group of fellow students you will design a new catalytic route for the production of a key chemical building block, taking sustainability considerations explicitly into account. This new process will be detailed and presented as a poster presentation. Furthermore, the processes which lead to catalyst innovation will be explored.
Evidently, the concept of sustainability plays a central role in this course.
For excellent students, who wish to deepen their knowledge in catalysis (and, consequently earn up to 1 full extra point on the total course mark) we offer an extra assignment.
Further information is available at the bottom of the page.