school

07
Jul
2016
Aperiodic Crystals school in Antwerp

Aperiodic Crystals school in Antwerp

This last week I participated in the Aperiodic Crystals school held at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. It was a week of lectures and tutorials on modulated crystal structures and quasicrystals, and was basically perfectly catered for what I need for my continued PhD project.

Apart from learning a bunch of useful knowledge about superspace and superstructures, I also got some more knowledge about how to use JANA2006 to solve (in)commensurately modulated structures from single crystal data. Now I just have to figure out how to index the data that I already have…

The week ended up being super busy for me, but there was some time in the evenings to go out with people, finding interesting local beer and food. I was especially happy about finally trying cherry beer (kriek), which I’d never even heard of before. I also got to meet a lot of new awesome people, both fellow participants of the school and lecturers – some of which I’ll meet again soon at the ECM-30 conference in Basel at the end of August.
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Posted by PJR in Travel, Workshops, schools, and courses, 0 comments
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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Posted by PJR in Experiments, Studies, Teaching, Website, Workshops, schools, and courses, 0 comments
17
Sep
2012

One more workshop on the list – this time on DISCUS

During the full last week, I was in Erlangen (Germany, close to Nürnberg), following a workshop on the diffuse scattering simulation program DISCUS.

It was lots of fun, but I had kind of hoped for something else. A lot of the first day (and sub-sequent days) were used on how to use linux and the terminal (and ranting about how bad windows is – that is, using bad and wrong arguments for it…), instead of introducing the program in a good way. We went through a lot of different tutorials, but a lot of it was very hurried, and not very deep. I guess that at least I got a lot of tools back home with me, so if I really need to use the program (I don’t know if I will, yet), I have something to read up on.

I did buy the DISCUS cook book beforehand, and read a little in it (I didn’t get that far because of me being really busy). I must say that it was a really expensive book, due to the fact that you can only get it i hard-cover, but it is well written – and I think I’ve learned far more from that short period of reading in it, than I did from the actual workshop.

All that said, I would probably recommend people going to the workshop if they actually intend to use the program themselves. It’s really hard figuring out the small logic things on your own – like the fact that they have three different independent programs in the package.

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Posted by PJR in Travel, Workshops, schools, and courses, 0 comments
17
Aug
2012

Teaching at a neutron and X-ray scattering summer course

These last couple of days (that is, Monday through Wednesday), I’ve been one of the teachers of the Applications of X-ray and Neutron Scattering in Biology, Chemistry and Physics course held as a collaboration between the University of Copenhagen, the University of Lund, the University of Roskilde, and DTU. It’s a three week course, and this is the first time for the course to be held.

The idea was to teach fairly young university students the basics of both neutron and X-ray scattering, in order for them to be prepared for the great new times with the ESS and MaxLab IV.

These first three days, where I was teaching, consisted primarily of introductions, and Monday and Tuesday I was teaching in split-sessions. These sessions were a split-up of the students in biologists and physicists (or, in practice, people not usually using a lot of math, and people better at math). The physicists were taught something about proteins, while Kim Lefmann and I were teaching the others to do some basic math, and understand things like complex numbers, Fourier transformations, waves and simple scattering. All in all, I think it went okay. But I guess I would have liked to be better prepared (I only found out that I was going to be teaching at Sunday evening…).

On Wednesday, I helped three of the lecturers with exercises. The last two weeks I have been working on a simulation of a simple neutron reflectometer instrument, to be used this single day. I never got the multilayers working flawlessly, but I got the rest working okay, and offered to help the three others to do the actual teaching, using the live-simulation tools that we also used during the tutorials that I was helping in on i Italy in July. This ended up kind of a mess, but I hope that the students learned something anyway…

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Posted by PJR in Teaching, 0 comments
22
Jul
2012
Home from teaching in Italy

Home from teaching in Italy

The last week (from the 15th to today, the 22nd) I have been participating in the International Neutron Scattering Instrumentation School (INSIS), partly as a teacher, and partly as a normal student. This was all happening in the small town Frascati, on a mountain close to Rome, Italy.

I was teaching the students about McStas during two afternoon tutorial sessions, where Linda Udby, Peter Willendrup, and I strolled around helping the students getting through the exercises we made for them. For the rest of the school, I followed the lectures – learning a lot of new words from the neutron scattering world (even though some of the lectures were kind of a repetition of what I already knew), and I met a lot of cool people. I really had fun during the evenings, talking to a lot of great people from the neutron scattering world.

We also got a tour of the particle accelerator at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, which was absolutely awesome!

A little trip to Rome

I did take a single day off, though, to go down to Rome and play turist. I went downthere awfully early in the morning, to have time to see things and walk around without dying in the heat. I was one of the first people of that day to get into the Colloseum – that was really cool. I also saw the pyramid of Cestius, the Trevi fountain, and the forums.

All in all I had a great trip – but I would recommend people that are not very heat-tolerant to not go there in the middle of the summer!

A while later, a meeting report was published for the school in Neutron News, which can be viewed here.

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Posted by PJR in Teaching, Travel, 0 comments
29
Jun
2012
Another workshop

Another workshop

This whole week I have been participating in the Second Annual Niels Bohr International Academy Workshop on ESS Science (yeah, that’s a long name, I know) held here at the Niels Bohr Institute.

During the lectures, we were told a lot about current neutron instruments, and the programming used to analyze data. I also participated in tutorial sessions in the program RMCProfile, and I was really happy to get to know that particular program. I might use it during my Ph.D., if I get the time (and beam time!).

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Posted by PJR in Workshops, schools, and courses, 0 comments
27
Mar
2012
Jana2006 workshop all done

Jana2006 workshop all done

Home from the first travel after starting my Ph.D. education! I’ve been to Prague, Czech Republic, the last couple of days, following a two day workshop in the crystal-refinement program Jana2006. The workshop was held at the physics institute in Prague, by some of the people that actually wrote the program.

It was fun times, except when I got lost in the area of my hotel because of numerous roadworks messing up my nice google maps printouts!

Unfortunately we only had those two short days, so I did not manage to get into the center of the city to turist around this time – however, I’ve been to Prague once before, so I guess I didn’t miss out on too much. I really want to go again one day though – it’s such a beautiful city.

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Posted by PJR in Travel, Workshops, schools, and courses, 0 comments