Academic exchanges are back! We host two foreign PhD students

The COVID-19 virus has caused quite a slide in many areas of life, including without a doubt science. But is it possible to imagine the world of science without academic exchanges and international cooperation?

After more than 1.5 years from the planned dates, we are finally hosting two foreign PhD students in the field of cultural heritage: Elena Verticchio and Gwen dePolo!

Gwen is a 4th year PhD student at Northwestern University of Chicago. She joined us for a week thanks to the NAWA project to get to know the group, learn about our projects and conduct an experiment consisting in microindentation of oil paint samples in order to determine fracture toughness.

The oil paint samples that we currently have in our laboratory are the oldest samples of this type in the world, prepared by Marion Mecklenburg, provided to us by courtesy of Dr. Laura Fuster López from UPV Universitat Politècnica de València

Elena is a 3rd year PhD student at Sapienza Università di Roma (University of Rome “La Sapienza”). The topic of her doctorate is the climate in the interiors of historic Italian libraries. As part of it, she is involved in the CollectionCare project.
Elena will spend three months with us, and her goal is to measure the sorption of historical paper samples under different temperature conditions. Thanks to this, she may be able to verify and improve the existing equations describing sorption.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *