Discovering the BIST Community at ICN2 and IFAE

As part of our mission to promote interdisciplinarity and collaboration, the BIST research centres are organizing PhD students’ visits, one to each centre.

The goal of the visits is to allow BIST PhD fellows and first year PhD students to discover the BIST community through interacting, sharing research, and learning that research at other centres can be surprisingly relevant to their own work. The visits also provide an opportunity for participants to meet regularly and build connections.

On June 21st, the fourth BIST PhD visit took place as a combined event at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) and the Institute for High Energy Physics (IFAE). We began the morning at IFAE, where we heard from Aurelio Juste about what IFAE does and how researchers in the field develop projects that involve over a hundred people from around the world. We then heard from BIST PhD fellow Ruding Petrossian about studying beyond the standard model, and from four IFAE PhD students about their basic and applied research in medical imaging and cosmology. Finally, we took a tour of the facilities to learn about the research done in the development of small sensors as essential parts of detecting gamma rays in astronomy. We then walked over to ICN2, just 100 meters away, where we heard from Jordi Arbiol about the kind of research done there, and from two ICN2 PhD students working on internal multidisciplinary projects. We toured some impressive laboratories and finally enjoyed a big paella together in one of the gardens of the Institute.

This visit gave BIST PhD fellows, who are pioneers of the BIST PhD fellowship program, the opportunity to showcase their work and connect with other BIST PhD fellows as well as first year PhD students in the BIST community.

Please follow us on twitter (@_BIST) and Facebook (@BISTBarcelona) to see real-time information about these visits and other BIST activities.