From July 13–17, Bianca attended the 29^th BMVA Computer Vision Summer School (CVSS) at Durham University, joining PhD students and researchers from around the world for a week of inspiring lectures, discussions, and hands-on learning. The programme covered key areas of modern computer vision, including 3D vision, multimodal learning, video understanding, self-supervised learning, robotics, and visual representation learning with experienced and recognised speakers from the field. Besides discovering new research directions and exchange ideas, Bianca could also engage with the community and made a special friend during the week: Alan 🤖 !

Inspiring discussions and valuable exchanges at the BlueMat Retreat in Schneverdingen: from June 29 – July 1, Berit, Dinah, Fabian, Malte, and Wiebke attended the first meeting of all researchers in the Cluster of Excellence "BlueMat: Water-Driven Materials". The overall goal of the cluster is to develop sustainable and interactive material systems deriving their functionality from their interaction with water. Berit is leading the Cross Area Imaging in BlueMat as part of her position at Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon. She presented the current vision of the CA Imaging team and the unique imaging capabilities available at the partner institutions. As PhD students Dinah, Fabian, Malte, and Wiebke presented and discussed their individual research projects with their peers. Overall, it was a great opportunity to get to know each other and establish new connections.

On June 17th, Wiebke joined the 8th Additive Manufacturing Meets Medicine conference in Lübeck at the Fraunhofer IMTE. She presented her research from a collaboration with Henrike Rebl and Susanne Stählke from the University Medical Center regarding the automated analysis of cell motility and morphology on biomaterial surfaces. Her talk was part of a focus session featuring researchers from ELAINE, a highly interdisciplinary collaborative research center on electrically active implants at the University of Rostock.

The CMART project partners gathered for a kickoff meeting at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) research centre in Hamburg, marking the official start of the collaboration.During the meeting, each partner presented a brief overview of their current work, expectations, and planned contributions to the project. This was followed by a focused discussion on initial steps for team integration and the development of a shared roadmap outlining the key tasks needed to reach upcoming milestones.A central theme throughout the session was the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration. Partners identified which teams need to exchange knowledge and how workstreams and results can be aligned across the consortium. The discussions helped establish a common understanding of the project’s next steps and enabled the team to agree on a shared workflow—setting a solid foundation for efficient and coordinated progress.

From April 13–17, Berit attended the 5th Materials Science Colloquium of Montanuniversität Leoben in Lech am Arlberg. Under the highlight topic "Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Materials Science," Berit gave a talk on "Utilizing deep learning to study and predict the behaviour of biodegradable magnesium-based implants ex vivo," presenting the latest work on digital volume correlation and virtual staining with deep learning.