Francesco Picchioni and Igor Marchenko win Ben Feringa Impact Award 2025

On Tuesday 13 May the University of Groningen presented the Ben Feringa Impact Award 2025. The fifth edition of the annual award ceremony took place this year at the House of Connections. Francesco Picchioni won the award in the researcher category and Igor Marchenko was presented with the prize in the student category.

Researchers

Francesco Picchioni (Faculty of Science & Engineering) won the award for his project ‘Rubber Recycling’, which focuses on reusing and processing car tyres.

Picchioni's innovative work focuses on the global environmental crisis caused by rubber tyre waste. With more than 1 billion tyres discarded every year, the traditional recycling process is inefficient, produces weaker materials and makes tyre recycling expensive. Picchioni has developed a scalable, patented process that reprocesses vulcanized rubber, creating a durable, elastic material suitable for industrial reuse. This method significantly reduces the need for raw materials - such as petroleum-based rubber - and minimizes the environmental impact of burning millions of tyres, releasing toxic pollutants.

The jury describes Picchioni's project as a fantastic way to reuse and reprocess car tyres, resulting in a high degree of social impact. It is a very unique and good invention and the jury sees it as a big plus that the project is patented.

• Would you like to know more about Picchioni's project? Read the article as part of the UG Makers series, the interview as part of his nomination or watch the video:

Student

Igor Marchenko (Campus Fryslân) was presented with the award for his project ‘Phone Masking Augmentation for Automatic Recognition of Whispered Speech’.

This research addresses a key challenge in speech technology: making voice recognition work for whispered speech. Marchenko describes that although whispering is essential for many people with speech disorders, current systems struggle to recognize it accurately, because collecting large amounts of whispered speech data is unfeasible. Marchenko's breakthrough came about by combining linguistic knowledge with machine learning. By identifying which speech sounds change most dramatically during whispering, he created smart data expansion techniques that help computers learn from limited data. His methods, validated on US and Singaporean English datasets, show significant improvements in recognition accuracy. By bridging linguistics and machine learning, his work has expanded the possibilities of inclusive technology. This interdisciplinary approach ensures the practical applicability of his research while laying the foundation for advances in ASR (automatic speech recognition) technologies aimed at disadvantaged communities. Working with industrial partners, his research demonstrates how theoretical insights can lead to impactful real-world solutions.

The jury is very positive about this project, considering its innovative AI integration as well as the applicability and cooperation at both regional and global levels. Igor Marchenko comes up with an effective solution that is easy to put into practice and has a significant social impact.

• Would you like to know more about Marchenko's project? Read the interview as part of his nomination or watch the video:

Ben Feringa Impact Award

Every year, the University of Groningen distinguishes special achievements of its researchers and students in the field of knowledge utilization with the Ben Feringa Impact Award. This honours scientists and students with exceptional focus on knowledge utilization. Knowledge utilization refers to linking scientific research to professional (non-academic) and/or societal (including economic) practice. The winning project in the student category will receive a prize of €2,500 to be freely spent. This amount will be financed by the Ubbo Emmius Fund. The winning project in the researchers category will receive a prize of € 5000 to be spent on further knowledge utilization.

The jury for assessing the nominations for the Ben Feringa Impact Award 2025 consisted of Erik Frijlink (UMCG/FMW/FSE), Joost van Egmond (Science journalist, Trouw), Marijke Leliveld (FEB), Mateo Bril (Studentassessor CvB), Mladen Popovic (FRC&M) and Nienke Homan (President VNCI).