"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 undergraduate project at the Institute for Biomedical Printing Technology where she met Mariana Acedo Mestre, who had studied at Tecnun. "She told me about the School's Tissue Engineering Group and the good experiences she had during her time there and created the contact with Prof. Jacobo Paredes," Inga relates, "and since the research topics interested me a lot, I decided to take a semester from my regular studies and do a placement research in this group."

During his placement, he worked on the characterization of electrospun nanofiber meshes that is connected to the research project of 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 in the lab, fabricating electrospun meshes from different polymer solutions and characterizing them by tensile testing and microscopic imaging with SEM," he maintains. "I also learned a lot by doing cell studies with muscle cells. What I enjoyed most was seeing many new techniques for fabrication and characterization of biomaterials that I hadn't used before."

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

María Bikuña says that it has been an enriching experience. "She contacted us thanks to a former student of Tecnun and since then Jacobo and I set her a project where she had to study the mechanical properties of polymeric fibers. The project is closely related to my thesis project where I study the properties of nanofibers 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 fibers. In addition, I have been helping her with the different techniques to measure the properties of the fibers (tensile tests, sem, plasma equipment at 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."