The nanobiologist and university professor Peter Peters tells us about a completely new method to cure cancer. He and his team at Maastricht University will make massively tiny organs (or organoids) from healthy and malignant cells and test them on different drugs to find the best drug cocktail for the cancer patient.

Mary Wanjiku Gichuhi who is an international speaker. She shares her experience, lessons learnt as well as practical tools that she has used herself to overcome adversities that will for sure help anyone going through tough times.

Losing her first daughter shortly before she was born was a life-changing event for Oana Cipca. Now she wants to inspire other people to reach their goals by feeling compassion for others in need and tell them how that helped to heal the traumas in her own life.

Oana Cipca runs a successful foundation helping now almost 100 orphans in Romania to discover and develop their own talents, aiming to give them a purpose in life that helps them choose the positive path in their lives and become World’s future leaders, doctors, researchers, and much more.

Renaat Toppets speaks about the T-Rex that we frequently see in front of us and how a personal story made him realize that you never know the whole story behind what happens.

Why do highly-skilled individuals come to the Maastricht region? Why do they want to stay? Or why do they plan to leave again? And how can we make the Euregio Meuse-Rhine more attractive for them? 

These are some of the questions that Julia Reinold tackles in her PhD research at Maastricht University. She also is a true child of this region herself: Julia grew up in the German part of the Euroregion, studied at Maastricht University and is now working there as a researcher. 

Maria Tomai just came back from a six-week stay in Ghana where she researched the topic of solid waste management. Apart from her research, there were many insights that she gained during her stay about the value of personal relationships.

Everybody who has been to a malaria region has slept under a mosquito net. Mosquito nets have saved more than six million lives over the past 15 years. However with the decrease in cases of malaria, people have started finding other uses for their mosquito nets; fishing, for example. Bart Knols has been working on ways to reverse this trend by making mosquito bed nets more attractive. This is where Manchester United comes in. 

For Leon Aarts, food has been a common thread throughout his life as he journeyed from chef to restaurant owner to establishing two charities related to food. The founder of #FillTheCup, #Compassion and#CalaisKitchens speaks about the power of food in connecting people. Compassion is truly delicious.

Maurice Sopacua is a medical doctor who believes in the importance of taking challenges and risks - and following your heart. From an early age, he became interested in human mobility.

ElizaMaree Power, Communications specialist and PK team member shares a personal story about how English News - RTV Maastricht was conceived and developed and now helps with the integration of internationals in Maastricht. 

Shyama Ramani is Professorial Fellow at the research institute United Nations University-MERIT in Maastricht. Her research focuses on the relationships between technology, innovation and their governance for inclusive development. She is also the founder of two non-profit research units ‘Association Un Ami’ and ‘Friend in Need Trust’, in France and India.

Shyama experiences three kinds of knowledge divides today: that between students and scholars in good institutions and the not-so-good ones, that between academics and society and that between truth and fabricated truth.

In her PechaKucha presentation she shows how academics can contribute to societal welfare just through sharing the results of their research in an understandable way. 

Hub Gielissen has worked most of his career in the field of ‘capacity development’ in developing countries and in post-conflict areas, such as Georgia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Mali, Chad, Ghana. This strongly influenced his way of perception and photographing.

With his photography – especially by means of social landscapes and portraits – he tries to capture features of ‘la condition humaine’, of people in their vulnerability.

In his PechaKucha presentation, he presents spoken stories and images of people who became vulnerable by external events.