On this page, you can read the latest news from and about the campus: stories about partnerships, new projects, companies and initiatives on and around the campus.
An idea conceived in a Groningen laboratory has grown into a tablet that is now being tested in patients for the first time. In the world of drug development, that is a rare achievement. Yet this is exactly what entrepreneur Kees van der Graaf, owner of Sulfateq, and Rob Henning, pharmacologist at the UMCG, have accomplished with SUL-238, an investigational drug that could potentially help treat chronic conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, heart failure and kidney disease.
The University of Groningen (RUG), Hanze and the ACLO are joining forces to build a new Sports Centre on Zernike Campus. The new building will be constructed next to the current Sports Centre. Construction work is now underway. Pile driving starts 3 July, 2026.
When top athlete and Team 4 Mijl ambassador Paavo de Leng fires the starting gun on Friday 11 September, Campus Groningen will quite literally spring into action. During the seventh edition of the Campus Trail, participants will run a 6.4-kilometre course packed with innovation, remarkable locations, live music and unexpected encounters.
How can we make millions of homes more sustainable without burdening residents with high costs or requiring entire neighbourhoods to undergo energy upgrades at the same time? That question has driven researchers at DNV on Campus Groningen over the past eighteen months. The result was unveiled on 18 June: a proof-of-concept multi-fuel boiler capable of automatically switching between different types of sustainable gases.
The UMCG Transplant Centre at the Healthy Ageing Campus is developing an Organ Assessment & Repair Centre (ARC)
What if students didn't just learn about the future, but actually helped build it? In the open category of the RDW Self-Driving Challenge, educational institutions are working on autonomous mobility in real-world settings.
On Tuesday 9 June, the Ben Feringa Impact Award 2026 was presented. The 6th edition of the annual award ceremony took place at Forum Groningen. Sasha Ivashchenko won the award in the researcher category and Thijs van der Laan was presented with the prize in the student category.
The first full edition of Marathon Groningen, powered by Campus Groningen, is a wrap. With over 12,000 participants, thousands of spectators along the route, and a widely supported ambition for the future, the event has instantly put itself firmly on the map. For Johan Meijer, project manager at Golazo, the impact on the city in particular is a reason to look back with pride.
A European first at Hanze: a five-storey timber building was digitally tested for earthquake resilience. On 8 May, different parts of the building, including floors and walls, were tested simultaneously at facilities in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Greece. Through a digital connection, all test sites operated as one integrated system, allowing researchers to measure the behaviour of the entire building. Vibrations affecting one component immediately influenced all other components within the digital model. Until now, earthquake testing has often been carried out separately. One team would analyse the effect on a wall, while another focused on the floor. However, these components interact with one another, meaning separate tests cannot capture the full picture. The Hysteresis project addresses this challenge.Bringing everything together For the first time, measurement data from a complex building were combined in real time from multiple locations, as if the structure were being tested as a single unit. No European testing facility currently has the equipment needed to analyse an entire building under earthquake conditions. By virtually linking leading facilities through advanced software, researchers created a distributed testing environment capable of doing exactly that. From Groningen’s BuildinG facility, researchers Ihsan Bal, Eleni Smyrou and Kamer Ozdemir coordinated the live simulation. In Patras, Greece, damping elements were tested, while in Bristol, UK, timber walls were subjected to earthquake simulations on sandy soil conditions. The resulting reaction forces travelled back to Groningen within milliseconds, where the algorithm continuously adjusted its calculations. “We hope this test will help engineers gain greater confidence in these systems,” says Bal. “We also want to discover how they can be designed more efficiently.”Timber instead of concrete The choice of timber is deliberate. Concrete is responsible for an estimated 5–8% of global CO₂ emissions, while timber stores carbon and is significantly less resource-intensive to produce and transport. However, wider adoption of timber in multi-storey construction requires improved technical guidelines. In the absence of such guidance, builders often rely on heavy concrete foundations that may not always be necessary. This experiment provides data that could help change that.Relevance for the Groningen region The findings are directly relevant to the Groningen region. The project improves understanding of how earthquakes affect individual building components, such as floors and walls, and how these components interact. This knowledge can support better assessment and strengthening of existing buildings, while also informing the design of new timber structures. “It is a long-term investment by Hanze to carry out earthquake-resilience research here in the region. I am proud that we have been able to make this happen,” Bal concludes. Source: hanze.nl
