On Tuesday, 9th of May, the CompEng Coordination Office invited five CompEng graduates to give first-hand and practice-oriented accounts of their everyday life as PhD students. The event contained of a series of talks in which the graduates provided essential information about their work experience and career path. Afterwards, the CompEng students had the opportunity to ask questions.

The event was introduced by General Coordinator Jörg Sahlmen and moderated by Sarah Jordan and Christina Rauch from the CompEng coordination team. Ghina Jezdan from the institute of Mechanics of Materials started as the first speaker. Her research topic is "Relaxed Based Modelling of Inelastic Materials". The second speaker was Amit Pal from the Research Group Mechanics of Adaptive Systems. He is working on the application of Machine Learning in Control Theory. During a small break with some drinks, many students seized their opportunity and asked the CompEng graduates more questions on pursuing a PhD.

After the break, Ika Kurniawati from the Institute for Wind Engineering and Fluid Mechanics held her presentation. In her research, she is working on the full-scale measurement on a large offshore wind turbine prototype to investigate Vortex-induced vibration. Tagir Iskhakov from the Institute for Structural Mechanics was next to present. He recently successfully defended his PhD topic “Cementitious Composite Materials: Material Modelling Across Multiple Scale”. The last presentation of the day was given by Sharan Nurani Ramesh from the Chair of Continuum Mechanics. In his PhD research, he is working on the “Modelling and Simulation of Pharmaco-Mechanical Interactions for an Improved Treatment of Cardiovascular Diseases".

All presentations were very insightful and offered essential information for the academic path of the PhD.

Thank you to everyone who attended the event and a special thanks to our five speakers!