"I am very grateful to Tecnun for the research stay I have been able to do."

Inga Königstein is 23 years old and studied Biomedical Engineering at the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany). She worked on her project from licentiate degree at high school in Biomedical Printing Technology where she met Mariana Acedo Mestre, who had studied at Tecnun. "She told me about the group Tissue Engineering at the School and the good experiences she had during her time there and created the contact with Prof. Jacobo Paredes", Inga says, "and as the topics of research interested me a lot, I decided to take a semester from my regular programs of study and do a placement of research at this group".

During his placement, he worked on the characterisation of electrospun nanofibre meshes which is connected to the project of research by Maria Bikuna, who supervised him during the three-month stay. "In addition to reading publications, planning and evaluating experiments, I spent a lot of time at laboratory, fabricating electrospun meshes from different polymer solutions and characterising them by tensile testing and SEM microscopic imaging," he says. "I also learned a lot by making programs of study cells with muscle cells. What I enjoyed most was seeing many new techniques for fabrication and characterisation of biomaterials that I hadn't used before.

"Overall, I had a great time at Tecnun. Apart from learning a lot about topic from research, I enjoyed the atmosphere at group and the interesting conversations with others. I am really grateful, especially for the organisation of the placement with Jacobo and for the time Maria spent supervising me".

For her part, María Bikuña maintains that it has been an enriching experience. "She contacted us thanks to a former Tecnun student and since then Jacobo and I have been working on a project where she had to study the mechanical properties of polymeric fibres. The project is closely related to my project of thesis where I study the properties of nanofibres manufactured by electrospinning for different applications in Tissue Engineering". 

Maria says that her work with Inga has been to guide her on how to use electrospinning and how changes in manufacturing parameters affect the final fibres. In addition, I have been helping her with the different techniques to measure the properties of the fibres (tensile tests, sem, plasma equipment on conference room clean etc.). "The truth is that she has been able to run the project on her own with a lot of independence and has been able to ask herself very interesting questions".