I was supported by an European Women in Mathematics travel grant for participating at the conference “Applied Inverse Problems (AIP) 2019” at the University Grenoble-Alpes, in Grenoble (France). The organisers of the minisymposium “Model driven deterministic and Bayesian regularization methods for Applied Inverse Problems” invited me to give a talk on my latest research, namely Bayesian variational techniques to solve problems of trajectory reconstruction from data defined on an unknown time axis (with a specific application to neurodegenerative diseases modelling).

I have never been to an AIP conference before, although the main topic of my PhD studies was indeed inverse problems, so I was quite excited and enthusiastic to be part of it. This year AIP celebrated the 10th year anniversary, and it was the largest conference in its history: about 600 people registered, and up to 15 parallel minisymposia session took place. Indeed the main event of the inverse problems community.

I was pleasantly impressed by the overall organization, which was perfect, and by the somehow relaxed environment of the conference, which eased networking amongst participants, across “seniority level”. A positive and productive atmosphere is, in my opinion,  not usual in such large conferences – but I found many people actually interested in each other’s work, and the organization  provided plenty of opportunities to talk to other participants.

Finally, I would like to mention the fact that at this very conference, the EWM Convenor Carola-Bibiane Schonlieb has received the prestigious “Calderon Prize”, which is awarded every two years to a young researcher who has made distinguished contributions to the field of inverse problems. Carola-Bibiane Schonlieb is the first woman to win a Calderon Prize, and it was quite a special moment being there, thanks to an EWM travel grant, to attend the prize ceremony and Carola’s lecture.