NEPHEWS first meeting hold at SOLARIS

The NEPHEWS partners met last week at the SOLARIS Centre in Krakow, Poland, for the kick-off meeting. The main goal of this EU-funded project is to provide scientists from all over the world with access to major research infrastructures in Europe.

NEPHEWS (NEutrons and PHotons Elevating Worldwide Science) involves the cooperation between 21 synchrotron, free electron laser and neutron research infrastructures, led by the SOLARIS synchrotron. The project will run for three years and focus on new and non-expert users, especially from Widening countries, Ukraine and Africa. The agenda of the kick-off meeting included the presentation of the action plan, project structure, communication and outreach plan, and much more.

The project will provide user-driven Trans-National Access (TNA) to facilities in research infrastructures (allowing over 450 experiments to be performed, corresponding to 900 users). There will be more than 130 twinning actions in NEPHEWS in which new users can participate as guests in experiments of expert groups, thus allowing them to acquire knowledge and hands-on experience relevant for their future research.

Additionally, NEPHEWS includes dissemination and outreach activities on the unique research opportunities offered by the large-scale infrastructures clustered in the project. Their research, often of fundamental nature, frequently leads to discoveries addressing the most important social challenges. Promotional activities will be addressed primarily to early stage researchers and countries where such facilities are lacking.

Funded under the Horizon Europe call on “Research infrastructure services advancing frontier knowledge: co-fund pilots with pan-European RIs and/or national RIs” (HORIZON-INFRA-2023-SERV-01-03), the project brings together several European scientific communities. The European user organisations ENSA (European Neutron Scattering Association) and ESUO (European Synchrotron and Free Electron Laser User Organisation) are directly involved, as are many of the facilities in the consortia LEAPS (League of European Accelerator-based Photon Sources) and LENS (League of European advanced Neutron Sources).