Words from the Director Trevor Forsyth - latest news from LINXS

LINXS Director Trevor Forsyth. Photo: Kennet Ruona.

We have a lot of news! We are delighted to welcome our three new Themes: Heritage Science, Chemistry of Life, and Environment and Climate, which have now started  their work. This now brings the total number of Themes to six. To introduce the people behind the Themes, and to facilitate networking, you can read interviews with all of the new Theme leaders, where we highlight their hopes and aspirations for the next three years. We also share some news on recent Theme activities, including the IPDD theme meeting back in May, and the NLF-conference in June. You can also read an interview about a recent NLF-workshop on food fouling.  

LINXS is happy to welcome guest researcher Carlos Campos (Federal University of Santa Catarina) who will stay until December and work within the New Materials Theme, you can read about his research interests.  During the summer we said goodbye to guest researchers Andrew Boothroyd (University of Oxford), Andreas Stadler (Jülich Centre for Neutron Science) and Michael Philipp Adams (University of Luxembourg). It is good to see published outcomes from your visits to LINXS. Thank you for your visits and for bringing novel science and collaboration to LINXS.

We are also very pleased to have secured major funding from the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND scheme for a project entitled Advanced Multi-scale Biological imaging using European Research infrastructures (AMBER). The project will secure resources for 47 postdoctoral researchers (total value over 12M€) working at Lund University, MAX IV , ESS, the  ILL neutron beam facility (Grenoble), EMBL (Grenoble, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Hinxton Outstations), the International Institute of Molecular Mechanisms and Machines (IMOL) in Poland. and Leicester University (UK). It will address key needs for biological imaging over length scales from molecular, through cellular, to tissue, organ and organism levels of organisation. The contract preparation process is under way and there will be more details relating to AMBER in the coming weeks.

It is also very satisfying that our planning for the move onto the Science Village is now nearing a conclusion following numerous discussions and site visits. Within the next few months we hope to be able to announce our future location, and we look forward to moving towards the end of 2024.

We have a packed calendar of different events coming up, so be sure to keep an eye on our website, and to  sign up for events as early as you can to avoid being disappointed if they have reached capacity. To name a few, we note the Heritage Science kick-off in October, a number of events within the Northern Lights on Food theme, and two Young Researchers’ Symposiums, one on Soft Matter in October, and one on Hard Matter in November. In addition, there is a LINXS Digital Town Hall Meeting in November, as well as ongoing lectures within the Antibodies in Solution: a LINXS NIST webinar series.

Take care and stay safe!