InterBridge at the ICARUS 5 Conference
What do nanomaterials, art and European university cooperation have in common? These were among the topics I spoke about on 2 October 2026 at the international RUN-EU ICARUS 5 conference, held online and organised by Ireland’s Technological University of the Shannon (TUS)
RUN-EU is an alliance of ten European universities working together to develop education, research and international cooperation. Since 2025, the Technical University of Liberec (TUL) has also been a member. The alliance aims, among other things, to strengthen links between universities and their regions and to create new opportunities for students, researchers and other partners.
At the conference, I presented the InterBridge project in a contribution entitled InterBridge: Bridging Science, Technology and Art through Cross-Border Collaboration, which I prepared together with Prof. Daisy Nestler from Chemnitz University of Technology, who leads the German partner team in the InterBridge project. During the twelve minutes allocated to the presentation, I showed how we bring science, technology and art together and how this kind of cooperation works in a Czech-German context. The PowerPoint presentation, featuring numerous photographs from our project activities, accompanied our contribution visually and can be viewed in the gallery below the article.
Our contribution highlighted an interesting paradox. While TUL is a member of the RUN-EU alliance, our German colleagues at Chemnitz University of Technology are not. Nevertheless, we presented a project on this European platform whose very essence is cooperation across boundaries – not only national borders, but also boundaries between disciplines, institutions and people with different backgrounds and experiences.
InterBridge demonstrates how bringing research, technology and creative practice together can generate new ideas and new ways of making science accessible to young people and the wider public. It also shows that meaningful international cooperation does not have to be limited to formal membership in a single alliance. What matters is finding common ground and creating opportunities for people and institutions from different backgrounds to work together.
Our presentation may therefore also serve as inspiration for the further development of European cooperation in our region – perhaps by exploring new ways for German partners, such as Chemnitz University of Technology, to become involved in similar activities in the future.
Because bridges between universities, disciplines and countries do not begin with membership in an organisation. They begin when people start working together on something meaningful.
Hana Křížová
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