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December 2024 ESRFnews
INNOVAXN
help to forge vital connections with the past, especially
in war-torn societies. “Growing up in a country that was
rebuilding itself after years of war and destruction, I
realized the importance of conservation and restoration
of heritage,” she says. “It provides individuals and
society with a better understanding of who we are, and
where we belong.” Thanks to InnovaXN, she adds,
young researchers are able to “become professionals in
their field, by developing not only technical but also
important soft skills, through various pieces of
training.”
“In many other PhD programmes, students are
primarily immersed only in university life,” says
Alexander Suarez, who defended his thesis on
catalysis for air pollution control in April. “At
InnovaXN, however, I could work with a synchrotron,
with industry and with a university – giving me unique
skills that I could not otherwise have developed… My
biggest hope now is to contribute to solving global
challenges, as part of a team dedicated to addressing
urgent issues.”
This is a common theme among InnovaXN
students that the programme has given them a taste of
everything academia industry and cuttingedge
instrumentation so they can decide where their
talents will have the most impact It all bodes well for
NextStep a new doctoral programme that is launching
its first call for applicants in February 2025 including
eDREAM the European Distributed Research
Infrastructure for Advanced Electron Microscopy
as well as the ESRF and the ILL as recruiting
institutions
Jon Cartwright
she says. “This programme has opened up opportunities
that would have been difficult to access otherwise. And
that’s significant, because it’s not always easy for PhD
students to understand their options after graduation.”
Balugani’s industrial supervisor, Hugo Doyle at
First Light Fusion in the UK, says the benefits go both
ways. “It has helped us further develop links with the
ESRF, access synchrotron experiments, and further
our understanding of the fundamental material
properties in our fusion targets,” he says. The results
have fed in to his team’s computer simulations. “If we
don’t accurately model these materials, it ultimately
means our targets do not perform well, and we see
reduced fusion yield,” he adds.
Another industrial supervisor who is grateful
for the InnovaXN programme is Jitte Flapper at
the multinational paints and coatings company
AkzoNobel. His project was a collaboration with the
University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and the
Rijksmuseum, also in Amsterdam, to study the drying
of paints both historical – such as Rembrandt’s The
Night Watch and modern Luckily there are a lot
of similarities between traditional oil paintings and
presentday alkyd paints which are used for wooden
substrates for example he says The insights we
gained could help us to better understand the
processes taking place in an ageing paint layer We had
the opportunity to have some specific measurements
done on our own modern paints which taught us some
things we were not previously aware of
In June Flappers student Ida Fazlić won a national
competition in her native Bosnia and Herzegovina to
present a research programme in simple terms in under
three minutes She believes that studies such as hers
Another InnovaXN
student, Alexander
Suarez, has
worked with
the company
Umicore to study
exhaust catalysts
in real working
conditions at ID26.
E S R F/ S T E F C A N D É