This Thursday, Martina will defend her PhD thesis on Experimental characterisation, modelling and simulation of composite highly flexible beams – Application to unloaded shafts of flexible endoscopes. The public defence at Friedrich Alexander University (FAU) will start on Thursday 5 December at 9 AM, scheduled as a pure on-site event in Erlangen. Some ESRs and PIs of the THREAD network plan to attend in person.

Martina was THREAD's ESR10 under the supervision of Sigrid Leyendecker (FAU). With practical experiments, measurements, modelling and simulation, she addressed in a holistic way THREAD's Industrial challenge IC4 Biomedical Engineering.

In joint work with Margus Lohk from THREAD's industrial partner Karl Storz and with colleagues from the THREAD team at FAU, she reported at the ECCOMAS 2022 congress in Oslo on Homogenization of the constitutive properties of composite beam cross-sections, see link. Martina co-authored three papers that have been submitted to high-quality international journals (under review). Her joint work with the THREAD teams in Trondheim and Erlangen on Neural networks for the approximation of Euler's elastica paved the way for a new project proposal on combining physical modelling with machine learning techniques (MSCA DN-JD call 2024).

Martina started her ESR project in May 2020, in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic: I took the train with mask and gloves, Roma Termini looked like a desert and the plane was empty. Two weeks isolation ... (cited from her LinkedIn profile). Throughout the project, she has been very active in the social media and contributed also some of the best posts for THREAD's news blog. Don't miss her reports on the secondments to the academic THREAD partners in Kaiserslautern, Liège and Trondheim and on her three-month secondment to THREAD's industrial partner Karl Storz in Estonia.

Now, Martina will be THREAD's 7th ESR who defends her/his PhD thesis. Good luck!