From 17th-19th of January 2020 we had the chance to present our work at the conference Bioengineering in Ireland. The event took place in the very nice Mount Wolseley Hotel, Spa & Golf Resort in Carlow. We travelled there from Galway, Belfast and Aachen.

After the registration and lunch on Friday afternoon the first talks took place. In the first session four PhD-students presented their work in order to win the “Engineers Ireland Biomedical Research Medal”. The prize goes to a person making a significant contribution to the field of biomedical engineering research. Maybe in the future one of us will have the honour to present our work at this point. The keynote lecture was delivered by Prof Liam Grover (Birmingham), who talked about his experience in bringing a medical device to the market. He presented the development of a fluid gel, used as an eye drop which consists of a protein (Decorin) and has a natural wound-healing effect. Then the sessions of postdocs and PhD-students presenting their work in the fields of Biofabrication, Biomechanics and Cardiovascular, started. The first conference day ended with a delicious dinner and a funny table quiz.

The second conference day directly started with the Horizon2020 session, where we ESRs presented our work. All of us were excited and a bit nervous regarding our first talk at a conference. All of us presented for four minutes with a subsequent one minute of questions. In the first picture it is Flavia presenting her work on “A Bioresorbable textile based bone scaffold for critical sized defects”. We all performed very well, so we were happy in the end and able to enjoy the rest of the conference day. Four more sessions took place on this day including topics related to Biomaterials, Tissue engineering, Bone and Mechanobiology.

In the evening there was the special conference dinner with the topic “Disney/Pixar/Illumination characters”. The second picture show us dressed up as Cruella de Vil, Sheriff Woody, “Queens of Belfast”, Minnie Mouse, snow white, Maleficent and as a soldier from Alice’s adventures in wonderland. It was a very relaxed atmosphere and very funny to see the costumes of the other people.

On Sunday everybody went home again with the nice experience of a first presentation at a conference in their suitcases.