Visits to silicon valleys founding fathers - 18/05/2016
Today's program consisted of visits to an university, a company and in the evening a visit to an escape room.
In the morning we visited Stanford, where we were enthousiastically welcomed with a very interesting talk about Stanford and especially the nano fabrication department of Stanford. The day continued with a presentation about DNA sequencing. That is, we learned the basics of how to read someone's DNA. Besides this presentation we got a demonstration of a system that makes use of a ferrofluid. This is a fluid that responses to a magnetic field. This fluid was used to create and steer droplets on a microfluidic chip. Standford also kindly showed us a wearable sensor that could measure different kinds of ions in sweat.
After visiting Stanford we visited Fairchild. At fairchild we got a presentation from Per Slycke and Cenk Acar about the MEMS accelerometer that Fairchild has developed. Fairchild did so by using some of the knowledge they got from acquirering the startup Xsens, which has it's roots in Twente. The visit ended with a drink in the lovely garden of the new Fairchild building.
In the evening we visited an escape room. This is a game where you get locked into a room and you have to get out of this room by solving all sorts of puzzles. All but one team managed to get out of the rooms in time. The other team was so fortunate to be set free by the staff.
In the end it was a day in which we had many new impressions which gave a lot of new inspiration.
By: Martijn Schouten