Carolina E. Lavecchia, a Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher in the School of Engineering, recently collaborated with a world-leading computational modelling research group at the University of Melbourne thanks to a fully funded scholarship, as part of the University of Birmingham's membership of Universitas21.

Reflecting on her experience, Carolina said: 'The internship at the University of Melbourne was a great opportunity. I improved my skills in computational modelling and learned about the experimental setup of mechanical tests. It was a great experience also from the personal point of view, having the opportunity to learn about new cultures and the history of a place so far away as well as widening my network.'

Carolina developed her skills through a seven week internship offered as part of University of Birmingham’s membership of the Universitas21 global research network. Carolina collaborated on a project that validated her parametric and scalable model of the lumbar spine with the University of Melbourne’s experimental data.

Universitas21 is the leading global network of 25 research-intensive universities, working together to foster global citizenship and institutional innovation through research-inspired teaching and learning, student mobility, connecting our students and staff, and wider advocacy for internationalisation.