conference

16
Jul
2017
ICNS in Daejeon, South Korea

ICNS in Daejeon, South Korea

This last week I’ve been in South Korea for the ICNS (International Neutron Scattering Conference), held in Daejeon. It was an amazing trip, and a great conference – and I have a million pictures to sort through now! I’ll share some of them here.

Helsinki layover

I had a 7 hours layover in Helsinki Airport on my way there, so I tried to make the best of it by taking a little sightseeing tour to the city. I’ve never flown via Helsinki before, so it was nice to get this opportunity with a little extra time to spend. I had time enough to take the train into the center of the city, and then walk along some of the beautiful old streets and parks down to the harbour with the markets and all of the little ferries. I then went – with one of the ferries – to the island Suomenlinna, where I walked around for a few hours to see the beautiful sights and views, before I took the ferry back, and then went towards the airport again. I could see myself returning to Finland again, to see the rest of the city, as well as the surrounding land. 

The conference

The conference itself went from Sunday July 9 – with a little welcome ceremony – to Thursday July 13. There were lots of company and institute presentations in one of the large halls, and the sheer number of parallel sessions in many different locations were overwhelming at times.

There were several poster sessions mixed in throughout the week, and I got to present my poster Tuesday in the long lunch break. I don’t think I’ve ever had a poster presentation be that busy and satisfying at the same time. Several people came to talk with me about my poster, and I got plenty of feedback on my work, and even a few new contacts. I had my phone on the poster, just as I tested out during the last DanScatt meeting, and I think it did the trick to draw attention from people.

Tuesday we got to visit the High-Flux Advanced Neutron Application Reactor (HANARO) a short bus drive away from the conference center. They are currently on shutdown, and have been for a while – so we got the rare opportunity to go inside the outer containment to see the beam ports and guides right up close and personal. That was extremely interesting, and I’m very glad that I got to go. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures within the research complex, and were even made to sign agreements about this and put stickers on our phone cameras before the bus transported us to the site. However, one of the conference photographers were there to take pictures of us!

HANARO tour group picture

The whole pile of us visiting HANARO, before we went back to the conference venue

The conference banquet was held Wednesday evening, with entertainment by a traditional Nanta performance – a group of entertainers that did all kinds of dancing and fighting and music with food and cooking utensils. It was really funny and impressive at the same time, and a super great choice for our group of very mixed nationalities.

Poster prize

The poster prizes were awarded on Thursday evening, during the closing ceremony. I had signed up to have my poster evaluated for a prize, but was not too hopeful – with how extremely many posters were presented at the many poster sessions. I ended up winning one of the 12 prizes though, which was amazing!

Included with the prize was also a €100 voucher for books from SpringerNature. On top of that, this diploma is nicer looking than both my bachelor’s and master’s diplomas…

You can see the poster itself on my poster page if you’re interested.

Exploring Daejeon

Unfortunately I did not have eons of time to explore the surrounding city during the week, but we did go out to find some local restaurants and to see the beautiful river front right behind the conference center. The weather was sweltering hot and humid, and I even had problems with the insides of my camera fogging up when I took it out of the bag several times – so I did not get many pictures as I wanted. We did, however, get some absolutely delicious food, and that I got pictures of!
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Posted by PJR in Conferences, Travel, 0 comments
02
Jun
2017
DanScatt 2017 meeting in Odense

DanScatt 2017 meeting in Odense

Yesterday and today I’ve been in Odense for the yearly meeting for DanScatt, the organization for Danish users of synchrotron- and neutron-sources and free-electron X-ray lasers. This time it was held at SDU (Syddansk Universitet), just like the first time I joined the meeting back in 2012.

There were plenty of talks, and also a poster session about scattering – I got to present some of my LSCO superstructures with a poster. I had some fun testing out a new idea I got for the poster I will be presenting later this Summer in South Korea at the ICNS conference, where I want to put my phone or tablet onto the poster (at least during the actual poster session). I used my phone this time, with animations of some of my reciprocal space data. It worked out really well, and functioned as a good eyecatcher for the poster.

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03
Sep
2016
Back from the ECM-30 meeting in Basel

Back from the ECM-30 meeting in Basel

During this week, I was in Basel to participate in the 30th meeting of the European Crystallographic Association (ECM) – the first time for me to participate in this conference. There were way more people than I had expected – I heard mentioned around 920 participants – and the whole thing was super inspiring.

I had actually tried getting a talk about my almost-ready to publish work on staging in LSCO, but I only got to present a poster. I did, however, get to catch up with a few people, as well as meet some of the people that I met at the Aperiodic Crystals school back a few weeks ago in Antwerp.

Monday evening there was a Young Crystallographers Mixer at the Bar Rouge in the second-highest building in Basel. The view was amazing, the drinks were great, and the music was loud. Quite a fun experience, although I’m not sure whether it worked well for networking or not..

Tuesday evening I got to visit the new Dectris headquarters in Baden-Daettwil, with a really interesting tour, as well as some awesome barbecue to top it off afterwards. It was really cool to see where they make the Pilatus detectors that I’ve seen so many times, as well as hear about all of the newer products they have been developing, and the history of the company.

The venue itself was really great, and there was a professional team of conference arrangers that took care of the practicals – everything ran so smoothly! We also had some pretty long lunch breaks, so there was good opportunity to get around Basel a bit. I might actually go to Basel again on a vacation some day, it was a great city – and the public transport was very efficient.

Finally, the conference dinner on Wednesday evening was held in the Zoo in Basel, in one of the big restaurant halls. Before the actual dinner (which was awesome, by the way), we were divided into groups and sent on tours around the Zoo. I got on the tour in their little aquarium, where one of the biologists showed us around in the back, where they breed corals, seahorses, and jellyfish. It was super interesting, and way too short. I could have stayed there for hours and hours.
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31
May
2016

Swedish Neutron Scattering Society meeting in Lund

I went to the annual Swedish Neutron Scattering Society meeting held in Lund, Sweden, this year – on Monday May 30th and Tuesday May 31st – to kind of get a feel for what is happening on the other side of the water from here in Copenhagen. I got to listen to a lot of interesting talks – many of them centered around instrument development for ESS and MAX IV – as well as present a poster on some of my more recent work.

On Tuesday we went on a tour to the almost finished MAX IV synchrotron, as well as the ESS – still in the building phase. It was super interesting to see both!

On my trips (I went back and forth by train over Øresund both days) I had some fun taking little video clips, finally resulting in a little video:

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28
May
2016
DanScatt 2016 meeting close to home

DanScatt 2016 meeting close to home

This year the  DanScatt (the organization for Danish users of synchrotron- and neutron-sources and free-electron X-ray lasers) meeting was held at the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences right on my campus, on May 26 and 27.

The talks were very centered on biology this year, and I found myself learning a lot of new things – even though I would have preferred talks more relevant to what I do myself. Hopefully it will be better balanced next year.

I got to present a poster on the afternoon of the second day, but the arrangements were so cramped that I’m not really sure that anyone actually saw it – we were so many people in a tiny, tiny space. At least there was beer and great people present!

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20
Apr
2015

Way too few updates

It feels like I’ve been updating this blog way too rarely the last couple of years – and that’s also the case for the web site as a whole. The last couple of days I have been procrastinating a bit, and had some fun with re-coding parts of the page, and setting up statistics. Turns out, a lot of the notes collections and old hand-ins get a lot of traffic, and it’s interesting for me to look at statistics for this.

Since the last post, I participated in several workshops, courses, experiments and conferences. Worth mentioning was the ICNS conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, two summers ago (July 2013), and a very exciting experiment at IN12 (ILL, France) the same month.

I finished all my teaching responsibilities, after having been a course instructor in the Experimental Physics course three times (although the first time was before I started my PhD) and once in the Neutron Scattering course, plus a couple of smaller things at different summer schools. I’m also almost done with taking courses, since I participated in a large number of workshops during the first part of my studies. I’ve had over a year long hiatus from my studies due to personal issues, and am currently working on getting back, by finishing my master thesis so I can continue on the PhD plan I started back in March 2012. Hopefully this will be over with in the beginning of this summer.

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16
Jul
2013
ICNS in Edinburgh, Scotland

ICNS in Edinburgh, Scotland

I have been in Scotland since July 7, and just got home yesterday. A large flock of us from my group went together to the International Conference for Neutron Scattering (ICNS) at the Edinburgh International Conference Center. Several of us also attended the Science & Scientists @ ESS satellite conference, which was arranged on Monday at the university.

The welcome reception was held at Dynamic Earth – with their cool white tent-like structure – and an amazing view towards Arthur’s Seat in the warm evening. It was so full of all of the conference participants, but a great place to see nevertheless – and it forced us all to take a rather long walk through the main part of the city, which was a wonderful start to the trip, to be honest.

At the actual conference center, when we got our materials handed out, they gave us umbrellas – expecting a normal Scottish Summer, I’m assuming. However, it seems like they jinxed the rain with all of those hundreds of umbrellas, as we got only beautiful warm days with lots of sunshine for the whole week. For once the weather gods were agreeable! To my delight, that also meant plenty of time (even in the evenings after it got dark) for me to wander around and take pictures. Edinburgh is a beautiful city!

During the poster session on the afternoon of Wednesday, I was busy presenting a poster about some of my LSCO+O superstructures. I did not have too many people come over, but at least a few was fine for me. We had a poster about our VNT e-learning neutron scattering project to present as well, so that was interesting.

Also Wednesday, there was a small reception-type-thing held as a private event up in the castle, which was absolutely mind-blowing! There was wine and little mini-haggis, and we could all mill about and see the crown jewels, and other little treasures they had hidden away in the chambers of the beautiful old buildings. What I loved the most, though, was the view as we walked up to the castle. You can see the whole city from there, and the weather was perfect as well!

The conference dinner Friday evening was held inside of the National Museum of Scotland, and what an absolutely beautiful place that was as well!

Oh, and we also had the pleasure of seeing Kim juggling not just balls, but also apples!

Saturday we took some time to go to Arthur’s Seat and enjoy yet another awesome view of the city. It was quite the hike, and I ended up not going all the way up there – but it was still beautiful!

Arthur's Seat

The view from Arthur’s Seat was spectacular

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15
Jun
2013
Nordic Physics Days in Lund, Sweden

Nordic Physics Days in Lund, Sweden

Between Wednesday and Friday this week, a number of us from the group have been in Lund to participate in the Nordic Physics Days held at the university there.

I got to present a poster with a few status updates on my LSCO+O superstructures project, and I tried making it a little more general – for a general physicist audience instead of an audience of specialized crystallographers. One of the steps to do that, was to make the title more fun – so I named it “Superstructures in a superoxygenated superconductor”, which I felt was maybe enough “super”. I also gave it the subtitle “An ongoing study of the high-temperature superconductor La\(_2\)CuO\(_{4+y}\)”, just in case someone wanted to actually know what was going on…

On Thursday, we also got to go on a little tour to visit the Max IV build site. It was extremely cool to see how they’ve started doing things on site, even though they haven’t gotten that far yet. At least you can actually kind of see the ring coming into shape!

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23
Oct
2012
Total scattering workshop in Santa Fe

Total scattering workshop in Santa Fe

From October 14th to 23rd, I was in the states for the first time. I went to Santa Fe (New Mexico) to attend a workshop/conference on total scattering, the Advanced Simulation Techniques for Total Scattering Data conference, arranged by people from Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The actual conference was only from the 16th to the 19th, so I had a few days on each side to go around town and be a bit of a turist. I brought my camera, and got a lot of nice shots (although I’ll have to find the time to actually do the editing and sorting of them later).

My flight there went through Heathrow and Dallas Fort Worth, and turned out to end in a mess – both ways. On the way over there, some very thick fog had hidden Heathrow, and we had to fly in circles – eventually landing in Stanstead to get re-fueled, before we could finally land – more than an hour late – in Heathrow. Of course I missed my Atlantic flight, but luckily I got on the next available one, and still caught my connecting flight in Dallas. My luggage wasn’t as lucky, though.. The people in Dallas were really bad at handling the situation, and it was first when I landed in Santa Fe that people could help me on with the luggage problem (at which time it was too late to send the luggage on from Heathrow, so I had to wait to the evening after). On the way back, our landing in Heathrow got delayed because of the number of planes waiting, and I nearly missed my connecting flight to Copenhagen. The people at Heathrow were nice enough to hand out special orange tickets for people connecting with flights that left soon, but they didn’t take into account that the name ‘Jensen’ is very common in Denmark, and hence stupidly enough only made one ‘Jensen’ ticket, and gave that one to the other ‘Jensen’ Dane that was going on the same plane. So I had to go through the normal procedures, and just caught the plane in time. Of course, my luggage didn’t, again. But oh well, at least I got home.

The conference itself was really nice – both the practical arrangements, the small PDFgui tutorial, the talks, and the trip to Los Alamos, were really well planned and executed. I learned a lot of new information about total scattering, and what it can be used for, and met a lot of cool people. I was really happy to talk to a couple of people from ORNL, to hear how things work over there, since I will be going there in half a year of so.

The turisting part of the trip went nicely as well – I had some fun walking around town, looking at the old buildings and just getting a feel of things. I went to a local supermarket just to see how it was (I was expecting the people packing your groceries for you, but it still just felt creepy to me..), and I went to lots of small restaurants to get some of the New Mexican food (which I was pleasantly surprised about), especially the chile. I even went all the way through town to see the farmers market, and I’m glad I did; You could get to see how they roast the peppers for the chile – that was fun.

Overall, it was a great trip, and I’m really looking forward to going over there again.

A while later, a meeting report was published for the workshop in Neutron News, which can be viewed here. The picture in the top of this blog entry is also from this report.

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Posted by PJR in Travel, Workshops, schools, and courses, 0 comments
01
Jun
2012
DanScatt 2012 meeting in Odense

DanScatt 2012 meeting in Odense

This Thursday and Friday the group went to the yearly meeting of the Danish Centre for the use of Synchrotron X-ray and Neutron facilities (DanScatt). This year it was held at the university in Odense (Syddansk Universitet), and it was the first time that I was there.

Some of us went together in one of the minibuses owned by the institute, and had a nice trip with lots of joking around and meeting new people.

The meeting itself consisted of lectures and some poster-sessions, but was in general quite boring. I brought my poster over my bachelor project, but it didn’t really fit in: Most of the other posters were centered around the use of neutrons and X-rays on crystals or biological systems, so a poster about neutron moderators was a bit out of focus..

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