39th ECMI Modelling Week
Published: 01 October 2026
At the end of June 2026, I had participated in a 39th ECMI Modelling Week in Lund, Sweden. This summer school, organized by European Consortium for Mathemathics in Industry is a week-long event, during which many students from all over Europe solve a problems given to their group under the supervision of instructors.
About Modelling Week
The Modelling Week is a, well, week-long summer school organized by ECMI in cooperation with a hosting university. This year, the 39th Modelling Week was hosted by the Lund University. The full list of previous Modelling Weeks can be found on ECMI website.
The form of the event is that the participating students are divided into teams. Each team is then presented a problem, which comes from the broad area of applied mathematics. This year the problems were very versatile, from detecting anomalies in financial data and assessing reliability of power networks, to modelling city trafic and how UV and chlorine water disinfection works.
Every problem has a designated instructor (or instructors), who helps student with their task and supervises their work. However, most instructors are hands-free and after the initial problem statement don’t get involved too much.
My project
I was luckily placed in a group, whose project was
Modelling combined UV/chlorine treatment of filtered water
The goal of this project was to create a mathematical model for combined disinfection of drinking water. My group has started with a model using differential equations. The we have simplified it, so as to focus only on the important parts of the model and to make sure, that the scope of our work is manageable during only a week.
My role was the implementation of our model, which allowed us to perform multiple numerical simulations. With my teammate Riccardo we have created both a Python and Matlab implementations and made sure their results were comparable.
The programming wasn’t my only job. During the entire week I was also helping with research, looking for the many constants needed for our model in various articles. Moreover I was something of a “IT helpdesk” for the team. When someone needed to find a way to insert a citation for some obscure data source I was lending a hand.
Conclusion
The ECMI Modelling Week was a very enriching experience. I am really glad I got the chance to be a part of such an initiative. I have met a lot of interesting, smart and inspiring people. I have made new friendships and learned a lot, both about mathematics and its application in research and industry.