First of all, I’d like to express my sincere thanks to MAPEX Centre for Materials and Processes to grant me this very prestigious and competitive research fund, which enabled me to come all the way from Brisbane, Australia. Without this grant, it could not have been possible to land on this beautiful Bremen and know all these great people at this research center.

I am Baris Demir, an early career researcher in Bernhardt Group at Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) at the University of Queensland (UQ). I have been hosted by Prof Lucio Colombi Ciacchi who is the head of Hybrid Materials Interfaces (HMI) Group at Faculty of Production Engineering. My role during this research visit is to develop a molecular-level computational protocol to investigate redox active solid polymer electrodes that will be used as electrodes in batteries. In long term, my visit will be an initiator for a research collaboration between the University of Queensland and University of Bremen.

During the first half of my visit at the HMI Group, I had the chance to be part of a collaborative research with experimental partners. Furthermore, I had the opportunity to attend Surf and Science Workshop in Sylt organised by Hamburg University of Technology and University of Bremen, which aimed to bring together researchers from these universities and enable them to share their research findings and discuss further research collaborations. The quality of the research presented by the participants was above standards. I also delivered a talk on the use of molecular dynamics simulations to elucidate the structure-property relationships in materials. I am pretty sure that the second half of my research visit here, at University of Bremen, will be as good as the first half.