Diana A was awarded the best student poster prize at the Advanced Accelerator Concepts Workshop 2016 in National Harbor, Maryland for her work on “Transverse evolution of e+ beams accelerating in hollow plasma channel non-linear wakefield”. Many congratulations to Diana!
 

Another meeting (Advanced Accelerators Concept Workshop 2016) with a strong presence of GoLP members with Timon M, Diana A, Joana M, Ujjwal S, Ricardo F, and Nelson L, presenting several talks and posters, and with Ricardo delivering one of the plenary talks.

On July 29 2016, Luis OS was distinguished as Grande Oficial of the Ordem da Instrução Pública by the President of the Portuguese Republic. Video of the ceremony is here.

GoLP was heavily represented at the EPS Plasma Physics Conference 2016 in Leuven, for several talks and posters delivered by Ricardo F, Marta F, Thomas G, Garreth W, Joana M, Marija V, Ujjwal S, Nitin S, and Anton H with an invited talk by Marija Vranic.

On July 4 Luis OS attended an ERC PI centric event hosted by the Agency managing the ERC programme at the Champalimaud Foundation. The event was also attended by Commissioner Carlos Moedas and the President of the European Research Council Jean-Pierre Bourguignon. 

The Summer School in Advanced Scientific Computing took place at Minho University, Braga, from the 20th to the 23rd of June, attended by over 60 students and researchers from all over Europe including GoLP team members Paulo Ratinho, Nitin Shukla and Pedro Carneiro.
Organized by the Texas Institute of Advanced Scientific computing (TACC) and Universidade do Minho, the event included topics in parallel programming and code optimization, data visualization, and a presentation by Intel of the recently launched “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi processor family.
This was also a great opportunity to get up to date with the latest trends in high performance scientific computing within the beautiful scenery of the Gerês mountains that surrounds Braga!

From 14-17 of June, Afonso Mota, a 16 year old, 10th grade student from Valsassina School, will be staying at GoLP for an internship as part of the project “my first work experience”.
Afonso is interested in Astrophysics and gravitation. Despite his young age, he will be learning the basics of Mathematica and Matlab programming languages and applying them to understand the orbits of the planets in the solar system and the periodicity of the tides on earth. Besides his work, he will have the opportunity to interact with all the members at GoLP to learn about the exciting research that is being performed.
Welcome Afonso!

The editorial board of JPP is holding a meeting in Lisbon to discuss the exciting recent developments in Plasma Physics and the future directions for the Journal of Plasma Physics (Peter Catto, Per Helander, Thierry Passot, Neil Hammond, Bill Dorland, Alex Schekochihin, Troy Carter, Dmitri Uzdensky, Jon Arons, Beth Woodhouse, Cary Forest, and Luis OS.

On May 23 2016, and on the celebration of the 105 years of IST, the President of the Portuguese Republic, Prof. Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa (in the picture), announced that he will award Luis OS the title of “Grande Oficial” of the “Ordem da Instrução Pública”. This distinction is among the highest recognitions that can be bestowed to portuguese citizens or organizations by the President (IST News here in Portuguese only)

In the new institutional video of IST Luis OS has a cameo role presenting some of the Jorge V’s work on the generation of intense B-fields in underdense laser-plasma interactions, which was recently published in Nature Physics.