iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Very sad. It is up to Cambridge to determine if there was misconduct. But top universities can be very high pressure at the best of times. My advice would be no matter how bad things get. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel! It is always possible to pick yourself up and renew! RIP 😪

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Merging science into innovate UK then merging it into a bigger dept that also does business is NOT a correct direction. Science absolutely needs to connect to development. But we need strong blue sky research that can lead to the really big breakthroughs. And 0.7% GDP doesn't cut it!

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

The scariest moment in a microelectronics PhD is when the Chip comes back from the fab. 2 years of design then the moment of truth! Some people are so scared, they wait months before testing.. But my PhD student Emad got stuck in and his visual prosthesis chip works! 😁 @nclengineering.bsky.social

Emad testing his latest visual prosthesis chip

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

@newcastleuni.bsky.social turned on its #christmas tree today. It always goes exponentially crazy just before Christmas, but with the lights on, the Christmas break is starting to get real 😀 @nclengineering.bsky.social

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Funded #PhD opportunity for UK home students to do exciting research into #VisualProsthetics to restore sight tot he blind. Students should be 1st class in Engineering/Physics. www.findaphd.com/phds/project... #VisionRestoration, #Neuroprosthetics, #NeuralEngineering, #Bioelectronics

An image showing a concept visual prosthesis to restore sight to the blind.

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

It was wonderful to give a talk today on Engineering the Brain at the Banerjee lab Christmas Symposium in Oxford University. @nclengineering.bsky.social

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

Really proud that our (heavily delayed by COVID) groundbreaking method to improve the lifetime of optoelectronic implants by 100-fold has been published in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. eprints.ncl.ac.uk/308760 ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/112... @nclengineering.bsky.social

This image shows the concept of implantable optoelectronic devices for epilepsy and visual prosthesis. A sub-image shows the electric fields between key sub-components of the brain interface within the encapsulation layer. It is these electric fields that are responsible for degradation mechanisms.

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

It is great to see Our latest paper from PhD Student Cong Ma on "FEM Optimization of 3D Abiotic Glucose Fuel Cells for Implantable Medical Devices" hit the front cover of the Prosthesis Magazine 😀 www.mdpi.com/journal/pros... @nclengineering.bsky.social

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

The Jesmond Dene in Newcastle is lovely at any time of year. But this year, the Autumn leaf fall has been particularly beautiful. Well worth a visit if you are a transient visitor or student in Newcastle city.

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

Super excited to finally get my DGX Spark AI workstationb(Yay 😁)..... only to realise all tge ports are usbc-c and my keyboards are not... Doh.. will have to wait another day or two to play with it..🫩

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

Well done to my PhD student Cong Ma who has published his first paper on "Optimising the Design of Implantable Fuel Cells" www.preprints.org/manuscript/2..., which is part of an EPSRC funded Glutronics project.

An image of implantable fuels and what type of implant they can power - essentially, they are feasible for low-power systems up to and including cardiac pacemakers.

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

It was great to host a fact-finding delegation from South East University, China this week. I was proud to be able to show the standard of our teaching and research here at Newcastle. SEU is a great place. Looking forward to the reciprocal visit.

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

It's great to have a visiting fact-finding delegation from EEE at South-East University China. Proud to show how we do things here at Newcastle.

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

Newcastle is a wonderfully friendly and welcoming city. So today I was especially delighted to see thousands of ordinary Geordies show up to prevent a few hundred far-right hooligans from giving the city a bad name.

Image of peaceful counter demonstrators preventing far right thugs from entering the main square.

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

I reviewed this fascinating piece of work today at TU Delft. Dutch PhD vivas are somewhat different in format to here in the UK. But in the end it is the quality of the candidate that matters. And happy to say he passed my thorough grilling. 😁

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

It was wonderful to give my lecture on "Responsible Use of AI for Engineers" to our new MSc cohort today. A great bunch! and we had fun going through the tools together!

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

hoppingsfunfairs.com University life can be fun as well as work! From Friday, Newcastle will host its giant funfair called "The Hoppings", a yearly activity dating back to medieval times.

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Great to have Jason from Synopsys here in @nclengineering.bsky.social to give a seminar on their RTL Synthesis tool

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

It was wonderful to have a visit from Prof. Jong Mo Seo, Seoul National University to here in Newcastle. He gave a great talk on retinal prosthetics and we had lots of fun playing with our femtosecond super-laser!

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Great to see the Chinese New Year festivities today in Newcastle. It is an interesting image together with the Irish Centre. Both communities actually have historical overlap from the 1840s and co-located in various UK, US cities.

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Prof. Patrick Degenaar @patrickdegenaar.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

The Parkrun is one of the best pro-health institutions in the UK and it is FREE!!!. My local one in the Jesmond Dene is beautiful and the crowd is very supportive. They are all over the UK! www.parkrun.org.uk/events/

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