EPS Executive Committee and Staff activities August 2016
The EPS works to support its members. Find below the list of activities of the EPS Executive Committee and staff last month:
Triennial meeting of the Roland Eötvös Physical Society
The triennial meeting of the Physical Society of Hungary named after Roland Eötvös took place in August 2016 at the town of Szeged.
Introducing the next generation to the Science of Energy and Sustainability
One of the most beautiful and evocative places in Italy, the city of Erice in Sicily, was the location of an International School on Renewable and Sustainable Energies from 13-19 July 2016.
Europhysics Conference: The Dynamics of Complex Systems
There was an expectant atmosphere as the 120 participants gathered on Wednesday, 18 May 2016 in the Lecture Theatre of the Zeeman Building at the University of Warwick at the start of the Europhysics conference on the Dynamics of Complex Systems. The meeting, held in honour of the forthcoming 60th birthday of Professor Robert MacKay FRS, had a line-up of speakers drawn from the greats of pure and applied dynamical systems, mathematical physics and complex systems science, all areas in which Robert MacKay has made significant and lasting contributions.
Report on CESRA2016
The Community of European Solar Radio Astronomers [CESRA, http://cesra.net] held its triennial workshop in Orleans, France, from 13-17 June 2016.
The CESRA2016 workshop was attended by around 60 participants from 20 countries, and had a special emphasis on the complementarity of space-based and ground-based radio observations, and provided the community a place to discuss the exciting new science opportunities that arise from, for example, the Solar Orbiter and Solar Probe Plus missions, the new and future radio instruments like ALMA, E-OVSA, EVLA, LOFAR, MUSER, and SKA, and the plans to design and build a European spectroheliograph.
Editorial – Pulling together after Brexit
Like many physicists in the UK, I spent the final Friday of June in shock. Voters in Britain had just opted by a margin of 52% to 48% to leave the European Union (EU) – and suddenly nothing in the world seemed to make sense any more. I’d never really thought a majority would want a British exit (Brexit) from the EU. As with the referendum over Scottish independence from the UK in 2014, I’d assumed voters would come to their senses at the last minute.
Portrait of Barbara Capone: when dreams come true
Barbara Capone is at present an APART (Austrian Programme for Advanced Research and Technology) Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, at the Physics Department of the Vienna University. She is a young theoretical soft matter physicist, working on developing coarse graining models for soft matter systems to allow the design and simulation of novel materials in the nanoscale. Her work focuses primarily, but not only, on polymer science.
Below is an interview between Barbara [BC] and Lucia Di Ciaccio [LDC], Chair of the Equal Opportunity Committee of EPS.
What’s new for 2016 from the EPS Conference Department?
The European Physical Society has established 3 different formulas of conference managing for its Divisions and Groups, as follow:
- Basic Option which includes the announcements of your conference through our network tools and the 1st step of abstract submission;
- Improved Option which includes publicity/communication + management of the abstract submission
Solar Power to the People
The Council of the European Physical Society, held in Mulhouse on 1-2 April 2016, welcomed a round-table on the theme “Physics for Development”. Several associations and organisations were invited to present their projects: Sunshine4Palestine and Liter of Light, as well as the Basic Science Programme at UNESCO, the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics [ICTP] and the International Astronomical Union [IAU].
Lucie Baron, business developer at the French branch of Liter of Light, was one of the invited speakers.
3D Printing for development an initiative of the EPS Physics for Development Group
The latest initiative of the Physics for Development group was to launch a program on 3D printing for science with the Cameroon Physical Society in cooperation with Paul Woafo (head of the physics department at Yaoundé 1 University), the founder of the Cameroon Physical Society and its first president. The main goal of this project was to improve the availability of laboratory equipment for use in university, especially for optics accessories. Nowadays taking advantage of the open source availability of 3D design of laboratory equipment it is possible to improve the situation in many universities in which workshops are scarce or not available at all. Through a close cooperation with the Scientific Fab Lab of ICTP (Trieste) a physicist of Yaoundé University Mr Nana Bonaventure was trained for three months and two 3D printer kits with spare parts were sent to him. He was able to build the two 3D printers and to print different objects.
NANOMETA 2017 – the abstract submission is now open
NANOMETA 2017, 6th International Topical Meeting on Nanophotonics and Metamaterials, will take place from 4-7 January 2017 in Seefeld (Tirol), Austria.
NANOMETA 2017 aims to bring together the international Nanotechnology, Photonics and Materials research communities where most recent and challenging results and plans are discussed in the informal setting on a glorious mountaineering resort.
