WARM WISHES FROM THE ELM LAB
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WARM WISHES FROM THE ELM LAB
Month: December 2025
They are called Engineered Living Materials and operate on the principle of “working with nature, not against it.”
The ARCHI-SKIN project is based on the research of these materials. It is funded by the European Research Council (ERC), and is developing a new class of bioactive, self-healing, and sustainable coatings inspired by fungal biofilms.
A breakthrough for the construction industry and the green transition.
Dr. Jakub Grzybek, InnoRenew CoE, UP IAM researcher, attended the 5th international scientific conference “WOOD–SCIENCE–ECONOMY: Sustainable Solutions and Digitalization in the Forest-Wood Sector”, held 3-5 December 2025, in Poznań, Poland.
Dr. Grzybek presented the Archi-Skin project with the poster presentation titled “Beyond Traditional Coatings: Toward Engineered Living Materials for Architecture”. Co-authors of the poster are researchers Dr. Anja Černoša, Ana Gubenšek, Dr. Wojciech Pajerski, Dr. Ihab Malat and Dr. Anna Sandak from InnoRenew CoE, UP IAM.
At the conference, participants took part in a Horizon Europe networking session that enabled intensive individual exchanges with international attendees as well as discussions on project ideas and potential collaborations. They also visited Brzechwa, a producer of prefabricated wooden houses and carried out a field visit to the Oborniki Forest District (State Forests).
The conference was organized by Łukasiewicz – Poznań Institute of Technology, Poznań University of Life Sciences and Industry Contact Point – Digital Transformation.
Dr. Anja Černoša, InnoRenew CoE, UP IAM researcher, welcomed at InnoRenew CoE, a group of representatives from the Slovenian Third Age University.
She presented the ARCHI-SKIN project, which develops bioinspired protective coating based on living fungal biofilms and other natural components. Additionally, she outlined other ongoing projects at InnoRenew CoE. Then they toured the building and laboratories, where she introduced interesting aspects of the architecture and explained the main functions of the laboratories.
The visitors were also greeted by Dr. Anna Sandak, InnoRenew CoE, UP IAM researcher and coordinator of the ARCHI-SKIN project, and by Dr. Andreja Kutnar, acting department chair of InnoRenew CoE, UP IAM.
