PINT OF SCIENCE FESTIVAL
18-20 MAY 2026
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Where Planets Meet Microbes
From microscopic survival to interplanetary travel, this collaboration edition with the Marie Curie Association brings two extremes of science into focus. First, antimicrobial resistance: how bacteria outsmart drugs, and how new chemistry-driven strategies aim to counter it. Then, the mathematics of waves—used to model everything from tsunamis to spacecraft re-entry on Mars—showing how abstract equations translate into real-world prediction and exploration.
Synthesizing the Cure: Tackling Resistant Bacteria
Emanuela Fedele
PhD Candidate
CM4Cure
I invite you on a fascinating journey into the microscopic world, where chemistry governs life at the atomic and molecular levels. Our focus is on a critical and complex challenge—antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Together, we will understand why the antibiotics we use will soon no longer be effective, how bacteria chemically modify, degrade, or bypass antimicrobials to survive, and we will finally explore cutting-edge strategies in drug design, molecular targeting, and innovative therapies to combat resistance.
Mathematics, waves, and the race to Mars
Julian Koellermeier
Professor
Ghent University
Waves are everywhere: in the ocean as tsunamis, in the air as shock waves around rockets. But how can phenomena such as the next big wave or the reentry of a space capsule into the atmosphere of Mars be predicted? Mathematics provides the tools to understand waves, to simulate them, and to compute their effects. We explore the mathematics of waves and their computation.
