Words from the Director Trevor Forsyth - Season's greetings

As the year draws to a close, it is nice to reflect on all that has happened at LINXS during the year. There has been a huge range of diverse activities, new themes, and the drive and motivation that has developed for the guest lectures, schools and the Young Researchers’ Initiatives has been inspiring. However it would of course all be valueless without your participation - and in many ways the strongest sense of motivation for LINXS comes from its growing community and from the growth that is being seeded for the next generation of researchers.

We are delighted to see such strong uptake for the LINXS young researchers’ initiatives for all of the life sciences, hard matter and soft matter focus areas. The events organised for each of these areas during the year have been exceptional – all driven and run by up-and-coming researchers from many different academic institutions – in the absence of PIs(!). The development of this community of early career scientists is a key priority for LINXS and of obvious interest for the user communities of the large scale facilities – both those in Sweden and those to which Sweden subscribes.

Our guest researcher programme has been very active throughout the year and numerous collaborative interactions have arisen from these visits.

As noted previously, LINXS management and staff are also delighted to be successful in securing EU-funding for the MCSA COFUND project AMBER (Advanced Multiscale Biological imaging using European Research infrastructures). This five-year postdoctoral programme will address key needs in multiscale advanced biological imaging, and represents a total investment of over €12M. The first call will open on 18th of January, advertising positions for 14 postdoc researchers. Please spread the word to final year PhD students and other interested scientists. It is a wonderful set of project opportunities over a wide range of science and should be of interest to clinicians, life scientists, physicists, chemists.

Finally, we would like to commemorate our former Scientific Advisory Board chair late Prof. Stefan U. Egelhaaf, who passed away in November 2023. He will be sadly missed.

We are looking forward to 2024 at LINXS – already there are many activities planned, so make sure to check out our events page. On our website, we also share some interviews and articles from previous theme activities, as well as our LINXS Christmas Calendar – where we highlight material from our Educational Platform.

Have a lovely holiday with family and friends.

LINXS Director Trevor Forsyth. Photo: Kennet Ruona.