GSPRE Symposium 2026

Registration

Please register HERE. For further inquiries, contact info.gspre@unibe.ch .

Information

Program

14:00 – 14:10 Welcome & introduction by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Burger
14:10 – 14:40 Keynote by Prof. Dr. Audrey Vorburger, Space Research & Planetary Sciences, UniBE
14:40 – 15:10 Industry talk by Dr. Daniel Rosenfeld, Melexis, a global supplier of micro-electronic semiconductor solutions
15:10 – 15:20 Poster pitches by PhD students
15:20 – 16:00 Coffee break, poster session & competition
16:00 – 16:30 Industry talk II by Dr. Nicholas Randall, Alemnis Nanoindentation
16:30 – 16:50 Award ceremony & welcome of new doctoral candidates
from 16:50 Apéro & networking

Speakers

Talk overview
Engineering for Extremes: Designing a Mass Spectrometer System for NASA's Uranus Orbiter and Probe flagship mission

The Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission has been identified as NASA’s next flagship mission, aiming to investigate the origin, structure, and atmospheric composition of an ice giant. A key element of the mission is an atmospheric probe equipped with a mass spectrometer system capable of measuring trace species and isotope ratios under extreme conditions.

This keynote presents the engineering approach behind the Uranus Probe Mass Spectrometer System (UP-MSS), focusing on how scientific objectives and mission constraints drive system design. Starting from the science requirements—such as measuring trace gases at mixing ratios down to 10⁻¹⁰ and operating across pressures from 10⁻⁷ mbar to 20 bar—we show how these translate into demanding system-level requirements.

The talk highlights the resulting architecture, including the integration of a time-of-flight mass spectrometer with dedicated subsystems for gas handling, separation and enrichment, and in-flight calibration. Special emphasis is placed on enabling technologies that bridge the gap between scientific ambition and instrument capability.

Finally, we discuss selected precision engineering challenges, including ion optics design, gas flow control, and ultra-low-leakage valve systems, illustrating how large-scale engineering solutions emerge from tightly coupled science and system constraints.
 

Talk overview
From Technology Push to Value Precision: Open Innovation as a Discipline for Engineering Relevance

At Melexis, we develop high-precision semiconductor sensors for large-scale applications, primary market being the automotive. This requires mastering the full engineering chain, from micro-scale physics and IC design to system-level integration and high-volume manufacturing under strict constraints of accuracy, cost, and reliability.

Yet in mass markets, competition is intense, and as a component supplier we represent only a small part of a complex product, with an entire value chain between us and the end user. Identifying where value truly resides is therefore inherently challenging, making the exploration phase critical. Innovation becomes a necessity, driving us to develop new classes of sensors, such as tactile sensors and robot fingertips for humanoid robots.

These experiences highlight a fundamental shift: technical feasibility does not guarantee relevance. Open innovation becomes essential — not merely as collaboration, but as a engineered discipline to explore ecosystems, engage stakeholders or partners, and uncover unmet needs across the value chain. Combined with a structured framework, it enables the validation of desirability and adoption alongside technical maturity.

This talk argues that innovation requires a new form of precision: the precision of value creation — ensuring that what we build is not only technically sound, but truly relevant.

Talk overview
Recent innovations in small-scale testing for industrial materials engineering

Modern industrial materials are increasingly engineered at the micro- and nanoscale. This is especially true in sectors such as semiconductor manufacturing, advanced coatings, metals processing, microelectronics, energy, and precision engineering. In these applications, very small defects, interfaces, grains, or thin layers can strongly influence product performance, reliability, and lifetime. Understanding how these small-scale features deform, crack, or fail is therefore essential for improving materials, processes, and devices.

This talk will present recent advances in in situ micro- and nanomechanical testing inside a scanning electron microscope (SEM), with a focus on practical industrial applications. These methods allow controlled mechanical testing of very small material volumes while observing deformation and failure in real time. For semiconductor failure analysis, this can help investigate cracking, delamination, brittle fracture, and the mechanical integrity of thin films, interconnects, and layered device structures. For coatings and surface engineering, it enables direct measurement of adhesion, hardness, fracture resistance, and wear-related deformation in individual layers or interfaces. In metals processing, it provides insight into how grain structure, crystal orientation, heat treatment, and forming history affect local strength and plasticity.

A key theme of the talk will be the extension of nanoindentation beyond conventional room-temperature and slow-rate testing. New developments now allow materials to be tested over a wide temperature range, from cryogenic conditions to temperatures exceeding 1000 °C, and at very high deformation rates. This is important for industrial applications where materials experience thermal cycling, rapid loading, impact, manufacturing stresses, or harsh service environments. Additional instrument innovations allow the measurement of rate-dependent hardness at constant indentation strain rates up to 10⁵ s⁻¹. This opens the door to studying deformation conditions that are highly relevant to high-speed manufacturing, machining, forming, impact events, and reliability testing, but which have previously been difficult to access at small scales.

By combining precise mechanical data with real-time SEM imaging and post-test microstructural analysis, these techniques provide a direct link between small-scale mechanisms and industrial performance. The result is a more practical understanding of why materials and components fail, how processing routes influence mechanical behavior, and how next-generation materials can be designed for improved reliability under demanding conditions.