The 3D Additive Manufacturing Conference of Soft Materials (3Dam2025) took place from 6-10 October 2025 at Miramar Palace in San Sebastian, Spain. This conference assembles diverse communities of researchers from both academia and industry, with the aim of covering a broad scope of angles on Additive Manufacturing (AM) of soft materials, including new printing technologies, the integration of digital design, multiscale simulations, artificial intelligence, machine learning, multimodality manufacturing methods, material synthesis, multi-material printing, composite manufacturing, and performance engineering materials.
Two POLINA partners, namely Haritz Sardon, professor at POLYMAT of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and Eva Blasco, professor at Heidelberg University (UHD), were part of the scientific committee that organised and hosted the event. Together with four other project partners, they represented the POLINA project with a total of six oral and one poster presentation while some of the partners also served as chairs during several sessions.
The first day on Monday, 6 October 2025, was dedicated to the Young Researchers Symposium and the theme “Focusing a Sustainability Lens on Additive Manufacturing: Asking More from Science and Engineering”. Ander Leiza Balda from POLYMAT and UPV/EHU held a talk that day on “Standardizing light: a modular photoreactor for controlled reproducible and high-throughput photochemical reactions”. He also presented a poster with the same title and attended to visitors in the stand of Hevea3D that was showcasing the photoreactor.
The second day on Tuesday, 7 October 2025, addressed “Light-Based 3D Printing of Tunable Thiol-Ene Polymers: From Submicron Precision to Rapid Fabrication of Biodegradable Implant”. Eva Blasco from UHD gave a talk on “4D printing with Light: Function Meets Sustainability” during session 2. In addition, she chaired the afternoon session on Tuesday as well as the morning session on Friday. Fernando Vidal from POLYMAT and UPV/EHU also presented during session 2 with a talk on “Advanced strategies for recycling of functional 3D printing materials”. He as well helped as a chair in session 22 on Friday morning.
The third day on Wednesday, 8 October 2025, touched on “3D Printing of Ionic and Electronic Conductive Polymers”. Andreas Heise from the University of Medicine and Health Sciences (RCSI) contributed with a talk on “3D Printing with Polypeptides” during session 11 while Haritz Sardon from POLYMAT and UPV/EHU, who also chaired the morning session on Tuesday, presented on “Printing milk: Exploiting the versatility of Maillard reaction in light-printable aqueous dispersions”.
The fourth day on Thursday, 9 October 2025, focused on “Dynamic covalent chemistry towards sustainable 3D additive manufacturing”. Samantha Catt from UHD delivered her talk on “Macromolecular design of inks for 3D microprinting” during session 18. She also chaired the afternoon session on Monday for the Young Researchers Symposium.
The great success of the conference was expressed by many partners. For Haritz Sardon, it was his first time as a main organiser, but he was impressed with the outstanding quality of European speakers and emphasized that “it is crucial to strengthen our activities in AM to differentiate from the world and keep the leadership of Europe in innovation and sustainability”.
