 Hello, my name is Paula, I am an international student and today I'm standing in front of the Water Experiment Centre 20. The reason why I'm here is because I want to discuss with you two very important projects that Saxion is focusing on. They are about sustainability and they are part of the very unique smart solution semester that you can only find at Saxion University. In today's video we will talk about one of the key concepts of Saxion, sustainability. In order to do that I have here with me Mr Ruben Timmers. Mr Timmers, could you please introduce yourself? Thank you Paula, I'm Ruben Timmers, I'm a researcher of the Chair International Water Technology and I've fulfilled different roles in education among others with the smart solution semester. Thank you so much, so as I mentioned before sustainability is a really important part of Saxion. But what does it mean to you? Well, water fulfills a very big role in the Sustainable Development Goals and it's connected to a lot of things in life, clean surroundings, life in water, on water, on land and I'm very happy to do a small part with my work in this research group. Thank you and talking about your work, could you please introduce us to your sustainable project? Yes, behind us you see here a prototype of an emergency toilet, a sewage-less toilet that can be deployed in areas where there is no sewage and maybe in areas that are struck by a disaster. And now with other partners in the Netherlands we are working closely together to add sensors to it and monitor the health of the population that uses the toilet and therefore maybe we can identify an early outbreak of an epidemic and prevent a bigger impact. Thank you so much for your answer and how do you see Medellu in the future? Well, the Consortium of Partners has a first patent approved to combine the sewage-less toilet to health sensors and of course we would like to see this concept evolve as soon as possible so we can offer it to people that are now without good sanitation and access to clean water. That's actually really interesting and what's more interesting is the fact that Medellu is part of the Smart Solutions semester within Saxon which is a semester where students from different courses can work together towards the challenge. Can you please give us a little bit of an introduction to the Smart Solutions semester and how does Medellu take part of it? Yes, Smart Solutions semester is focused on giving students a real-life experience on working with other disciplines and with questions from the work fields so research groups with their industrial partners or people from outside of Saxon send in their questions and challenges that go beyond a specific knowledge area and then students are challenged to come up with Smart Solutions literally that go beyond their own discipline. They have to learn to work together, come up or see the challenge through the eyes of other disciplines see how their choice influenced the work of others and therefore are very well prepared when they graduate and go into industry or other working positions. That's great and how did it feel to you to work together with students? It's very inspiring. Every half year you have new groups of students coming in they bring new knowledge, everyone has their own background knowledge so we are also lifelong learning and learning together with you we only have a bit more experience, we have more contacts and partners backing us up with these challenges so together we can really make a change and develop things that are in the benefit of our society. Okay and why do you consider it important for students to work towards sustainability projects? Well at this point our world is in need of moving their agenda the Sustainable Development Goals there is also a question about sustainable growth you even have people already saying that we have to degrow so the Sustainable Development Goals have been established years ago and we're not getting there soon enough so we all need to have a joint effort to get the goal together. Thank you and I have just one last question for you, it's about the living technology how would you say that living technology is incorporated in your project for the Smart Solutions semester? The way I see living technology is the importance that it plays in our daily life nowadays technology in general and that as an upcoming professional all the students need to know what is out there, what is possible and how they can take it into account and are depending on it also. In this project, the sewage list toilet that we're building upon already has a lot of technology involved and on top of that we're going to apply sensors and even light detection to see how the population feels and how their bio markers are so that we can see if a possible epidemic is on the verge of outbreak. We're now having been focusing on cholera next one that we'll be focusing on is COVID-19 a very relevant detection method to develop and there is a first patent already approved and we have other patents pending and working towards it so technology is very important and it is something that we as professionals together with the students are developing and then you have to know about technology and what is possible. Thank you so much, it is very important indeed and yeah I would like to thank you both for your time and for your insightful answers and for you I hope this video helped a little bit for choosing your future career path and also if you have further questions you can ask them later on during the Q&A.