Marijn Nijenhuis of UT's Faculty of Engineering Technology has received the Early Career Award for his contribution to advancing precision engineering. Nijenhuis received the award from the American Society for Precision Engineering (ASPE) and is the first winner from outside the United States.
Precision engineering involves the design, development and manufacture of high-precision equipment, instruments and products. The Netherlands is known for its precision engineering and mechatronics. Companies like ASML, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Demcon and VDL are among the big names in this field.
Nijenhuis obtained his master and cum laude PhD in mechanical engineering and has been a university lecturer in the Precision Engineering group at UT since 2020. He teaches the Precision Engineering course to second-year students within the VU-UT Mechanical Engineering programme. He also does research on elastic mechanisms for which he develops flexible multibody software. Elastic mechanisms function without backlash and friction, making them highly predictable.
