Bicategories are at the same time a generalization of the notion of category and - in an orthogonal way - of monoidal category. That is what makes them so crucial in monoidal category theory.
In my doctoral project I developed some constructions in the appropriate setting of enriched category theory. Moved by an application to a problem in representation theory of finite groups, I explored formal techniques for dealing with the huge amount of information carried by an enriched bicategory, most notably string diagrams.
Publications:
Enriched bi(co)ends (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05070)