Lively discussions at the Annual GEC Scientific Meeting

Just like everybody else, this year we were forced to organize our annual scientific meeting differently than before due to Corona. That resulted in an online, condensed meeting jointly organized by the Groningen Engineering Center (GEC) in collaboration with the Groningen Engineering Business Center (GEBC) on January 26. This annual event serves as a discussion platform in the field of engineering between researchers of the University of Groningen and companies that are located in the Northern Netherlands.

The keynote speaker ir. Marc Hendrikse, Chairman of the Dutch Governmental High Tech Systems and Materials Top Team delivered a very inspiring lecture about the strategy of the Topsector HTSM and on how to cope with this. During four parallel sessions, researchers and industrial partners discussed in more detail the potential of public private partnerships. Themes that were treated were AI and Smart Industry, Green Chemistry, Health Technology and Hydrogen and Energy.

The UG Best Engineering Thesis Award 2020 went to Bernoulli graduate Godliver Owomugisha for her thesis Computational intelligence & modeling of crop disease data in Africa. Godliver’s thesis was selected because of the high scientific impact of her papers, the strong interdisciplinary engineering focus and the societal/environmental impact with the aim to helping farmers to protect crops from disease and African regions to secure food production. Congratulations to her and her supervisors Prof. Michael Biehl, Prof. Nicolai Petkov (Intelligent Systems), Ernest Mwebaze and J.A. Quinn.

The event ended with a Meet & Greet, which was a great opportunity for networking and spirited conversations between the science and industry attendees.