Bio4MatPro: Kick-Off & first annual meeting

 

At the beginning of October, the first annual conference of Bio4MatPro could finally be held. After a long application process, in which RWTH Aachen University, CLIB, and many others invested a lot of effort, this Competence Center for the Biological Transformation of Materials Science has finally come to life as one of the first funded structural change initiatives.  

After the last two years with their various restrictions, we were even more pleased that the meeting could take place in person, and we were able to network in the beautiful event location “DAS LIEBIG” in Aachen. On the first (internal) day of the meeting, all 23 research projects were given the opportunity to briefly introduce themselves and exchange their ideas with the other researchers. Moreover, the strong presence of the industrial partners involved was impressive and led to many fruitful discussions in the networking breaks.  

The second day was focussed on Bio4MatPro’s external networking with many stakeholders from academia, industry, and politics. In cooperation with the HiPerIn 2.0 project, CLIB had organized an industry session to involve more actors. In this session, Dr. David Müller from Biomera, Dr. Frank Kensy from b.fab, and Dr. Roland Breves from Henkel presented their companies and showed how cooperation and collaboration with other industrial and academic partners is the key to success. They clearly highlighted that scaling capacities for biotechnological processes as well as lab facilities for young companies are lacking but are urgently needed to establish successful production processes. All three companies are already participating or would like to participate in the structural change and have committed their interests for cooperation and collaboration. 

For the coming year, we keep our fingers crossed that the planned accelerator will also receive the funding commitment. This will allow the results gained in Bio4MatPro to be quickly converted into new companies and future-proof jobs. 

Foto: thomas-langens.de