On 7th and 8th July, the School of Engineering and Materials Science hosted the 16th International Workshop on Engineering of Functional Interfaces (EnFI2025), which was attended by 86 scientists and engineers from 19 universities, institutes and companies from seven different countries in Europe and the Far East. We are proud to be the first university to host this workshop in the UK. The meeting attracted a crowd of highly talented young researchers from a diverse range of subject areas and offered excellent opportunities for PhD students and postdocs to network and exchange ideas. Professor Marloes Peeters from Manchester University said, "It was such a pleasure to be attending EnFI – my students have been very positive about the conference, especially because for the most of them this is their first conference, and it is good that they get to present their research in a positive environment".

Professor Steffi Krause, the chair of the organising committee, kicked off the meeting with a brief introduction to the history of Queen Mary, its structure and current research in the School of Engineering and Materials Science. Each of the four sessions was started with an inspiring tutorial lecture by an internationally renowned scientist. We were very pleased to welcome Professor Petra Agota Szilagyi from Oslo University (awarded Top50 women in Engineering in 2020) who was introducing her research on MOF-guest interfaces and their relevance in catalytic reactions.

Professor Julien Gautrot, one of the most outstanding academics at Queen Mary, introduced his unique research on the engineering of liquid-liquid interfaces for stem cell technology to the audience. The afternoon session on Monday was started by Professor Tom McDonald from Manchester University with a fascinating talk about Long-acting Therapeutics Enabled by Nanomedicines showing how medicines with slow release can be formed in-situ inside the body using smart polymers. Professor Pedro Estrela's (Bath University) lecture on Electrochemical Biosensors and Biodevices for Medical Diagnosis and Water Monitoring was a master class in how to lead an audience from the very fundamentals of a subject to exciting research outputs demonstrating how to design sensors that can function in real life applications in both medicine and water quality monitoring.

In each session, early career researchers gave flash talks to introduce the work presented in the subsequent poster sessions that covered a wide range of topics related to interfaces in advanced materials and characterisation methods, biological interfaces, molecularly imprinted polymers and electrochemical methods and sensors. The most fun part of the conference were the poster sessions. The diverse multidisciplinary background of the researchers present sparked a lot of interesting conversations and initiated many novel ideas and new collaborations. The conference dinner that was attended by all participants took place on Monday night in Queen Mary's most iconic venue, the Octagon.

Many participants commented on the smooth running of the workshop, which was helped by the excellent work by our events managers and caterers, but a special thanks also goes to our team of student volunteers who worked tirelessly to make this event a complete success.