31.10.2019
During the first week of september 2019 the FibreNet community gathered in Maribor, Slovenia, a historical city embedded in the drava river valley and surrounded by flourishing vegetation. The aim of this event was to provide the early stage reseachers (ESRs) with transferable, presentation and technical R&D skills related to biobased products. Before this event, ESRs attended a two-days workshop on project management and the dissemination and exploitation of research results as organized by the coordinators of FibreNet.
At the event, the ESRs had the opportunity to present their research results in a public science day with 55 international visitors. The lectures that were given at this conference will be made publicly available at zenodo.org. The company beneficaries Kemira and the company partner Mondi were giving their inputs in the form of lectures and discussions on the properties of wood based fibers and the career prospects in the biobased industry. An invited lecture on the state-of-the-art of the analytical chemistry of biobased polymers was given by Prof. Antje Potthast from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), Vienna. The event was finalized by two separate excursions of the ESRs to the textile fiber Spinnery Litia and the Innorenew Center of Excellence on Renewable Materials and Healthy Environments at the Slovenian Littoral in Koper under the generous host of the Innorenew coordinator Dr. Andreja Kutnar. ESRs could present their work at a meeting with the Alumni Chapter Slovenia of the Graz University of Technology (TUG Austria) including a guided tour through the facilities of Innorenew. Overall, the event was received well by the participants and the organizers hope that it contributed positively to the scientific and personal career development of the ESRs. We are therfore very much looking forward to the upcoming scientific and personal contributions at the 4th network wide training event at KTH Sweden, whose organizers already accepted the culinary challenge that was set out in Maribor.
Writer:
Rupert Kargl, Assist. Prof.
University of Maribor
Laboratory for Characterization and Processing of Polymers (LCPP)
