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FUNGAS Kick-off Meeting

Julia Vinzelj

Nov 1, 2023

While the students in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, have started their new semester, the former HiPoAF team has started their new project: FUNGAS! After four years of basic research, the team - joined by new experts and collaborators - now looks at potential applications for anaerobic gut fungi in biogas production.

In October 2023, project lead Hans-Joachim Nägele and his colleagues Christine Peters and Zrinka Raguz Nakic, invited the whole team to their idyllic ZHAW campus in Wädenswil (Switzerland), officially launching the FUNGAS project.


The project is funded by the Interreg Alpenrhein-Bodensee-Hochrhein and will revolve around improving biogas production for small to medium sized biogas reactors. The scientific experts from Switzerland (ZHAW), Germany (LfL), and Austria (UIBK) are joined by several collaborators from the industry.


The two days spent in Wädenswil at the kick-off meeting were packed with happy reunions, fruitful discussions, and energetic planning. While our industry partners were not able to join our prolific discourse in person, they did join online for a very productive meeting. After those days, we all returned home with heads spinning, but ready to take this new project by it's horns!


As a memorable side note: at one of the evening get-togethers in Wädenswil, we seized the opportunity to give HiPoAF Ph.D. candidate Akshay a proper farewell, and celebrated his successes of the past four years. Akshay is in the final stages of his Ph.D. and will not join us for this next adventure. His journey will take him westward and while we are sad to see him go, we are excited to see him take this opportunity and start his own new adventure!

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