 Ddweud iawn, ydyddai'r rhannu yn y dyn nhw. Mae hi wedi ei pethau i gael yn ddyn nhw mewn". Mae rhai ddysgu o ysgol yn ddyn nhw. Mae'n bwynt i ddweud y llyfrdol yma. Mae'n bwysig i'r rhannu yn ddyn nhw. Mae'n bwysig i'r rhannu yn ddyn nhw i'r hynny'n cyffredinolol, i wneud hynny'n cymdeithasol, i ddweud ymwysig i'r rhannu. Felly wedi ddyn nhw, rwyf wedi eu cymdeithasol ymwysig ddyliwch eich hunigoedd a chi'n rai arniwch i willoedd ynoi y pethau. Bydd hynny'n chi'n gweinio'tr, a hynny'n ychydig ei fyddio ry'n ddweud i ei fod yn ôl a peth sefydliadau arniwch yn ei hanfodol. OK, ddodd eich bod ddwych ar gyfer ysgrifennidog, a mynd i'n gweithio'n ddwy'r cyfnodol yma, ond mae'r ddwych yn cyd Brexit. Bydd hyn yn ei bod yn unrhyw o'u sadyn i L.T.P. OK. Yr hyn yn meddwl o'r fawr, a gydig i'n fawr, rwy'n meddwl i'r fawr, neu ddweud bod yn gweithio sydd wedi ymlaen i'r unig arall yn y ll Vitamin. Mae'n ddweud i'r fawr o'r felwyddiad, sy'n ymgyrchaf yma'r 10 ymgyrchau i'r Ymgyrchaf Ymgyrchaf Fynyddol. Mae'n gwybod i'n meddwl i'r llin o'r Philopin, i'r llunio i'r Unesco, a mae'n brifau'n peir i'r Ymgyrchaf Ymgyrchaf. to Hein returned international hub, where scientists from all over the world can come together and really as a way to use science as a common language to connect the world and make scientific opportunities available to people around the world overcoming the barriers of geography and gender or ethnicity or or ethnicity or economics. And I think ICTP has been very immensely successful in supporting scientists from developing countries so that they don't have to face intellectual isolation. And we for example, we have something like 60 conferences. Apart from the very strong group that we have, various scientists who are permanent faculty here, we also organise 60 conferences each year, more than 5,000 scientists from 130 countries come here each year. And so this is really a way of promoting both excellence in science as well as inclusion in science. And some of you who are part of this Physics Without Frontiers program have seen ICTP also as a kind of a beacon or an inspiration where you might want to go. Here is for example our Diploma program, this is a postgraduate program and you can see really young scientists from all over the world here just to let you know the deadline for application this year is the 20th of February. And this is a pre-PhD program in the five streams that are available at ICTP going from condensed metaphysics, high energy physics, mathematics, earth system physics, quantitative life sciences, cosmology. So this is the kind of the step that comes often in the careers of many of you who go through the Physics Without Frontiers program and some of them come to do a postgraduate program here, some of them have stayed on to do PhD and some of them have come here as post doctoral fellows. So ICTP really has this lifelong engagement and Physics Without Frontiers is really the beginning starting with very young students in their masters, before their masters. And I have to thank both my colleagues here, Professor Bobby Acharya and Kate Shaw. They have been really the driving force behind this and it's congratulations to them. And for their dedicated work over the years that it has made this program a big success. You can see here Bobby and Kate is not shown here somewhere but she's sitting there. And we have 10,000 students have been part of this program from 50 countries. So many different activities, 100 PhD students, postdocs and professors have contributed to this volunteer network. So ICTP really kind of pulls in all these international resources and makes it available to the world at large. And many of them, 300 of them have gone on to do MSC, PhD and postdoc. And so this program today is, I don't need to go through this program. I think we have a very nice strong program. In fact next week, in two weeks, we will be going to South Africa for the World Science Forum and Kate will also be there and there is a very interesting panel in which ICTP is invited, in particular the Physics Without Frontiers program to showcase to the world this very important and major contribution of ICTP. So I just want to end with a very, what I find is a very inspiring story. Once I was visiting Hamburg to give a talk and after my talk, a young woman scientist, she came to me and she said that, okay, here I have a gift for you and not for me. She said this is a gift for Kate Shaw. Can you please take it to Kate Shaw because she said I'm from Afghanistan. I'm the first woman doing a PhD in high energy physics in Hamburg. And this would not have been possible without the Physics Without Frontiers program of ICTP and without Kate Shaw. So thank you, Bobby and Kate, for making this program a success. And thank you all of you, all those who are participating. And I will now hand it over back to Kate. Thank you so much, Attish, for that lovely warm introduction and welcome to ICTP. So next on the agenda, we have Amal Kasri, who will be talking about the importance of basic science. Amal, are you online and able to share your screen and put your microphone on? Hello. Hi, thank you very much, Kate. Actually, I will just give a speech, it's not a presentation because this is what I understood was needed. So I'm not going to share my screen, I will just speak. Perfect, thank you so much. I hope this is okay. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. I'm really, really glad, actually, to be with you today. And, yeah, dear Attish, my dear colleague, ICTP director, dear physicists, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, I'm extremely delighted to address you today at the 10th anniversary of the Physics Without Frontiers. I'm sorry, excuse me. At the outset, I would like to thank the International Center for Theoretical Physics, ICTP, for this great initiative. Being one of the nine category one institutes of UNESCO and the only category one institute connected to the natural science sector, ICTP has an impeccable track record of accomplishments in pure science, international cooperation, science diplomacy, and capacity building. ICTP's Physics Without Frontiers strives to motivate and train physics and mathematics university students worldwide with a special focus on countries that are lagging in science and technology to help build the next generation of scientists. Over the last 10 years, we have seen the success of this initiative. Working with almost 50 countries and hundreds of volunteer physics and mathematics professors and PhD fellows, Physics Without Frontiers has trained more than 10,000 students worldwide and has hundreds of alumni who are now pursuing further studies, and some of whom have also become PWF volunteers. In this momentous journey, we cannot fail to attribute this success of Physics Without Frontiers to its founding and managing figures, physicists Bobby Asharia and Kate Shaw, who have enabled collaborations between UNESCO and CERN to further the objectives of ICTP. And I would like also to take this opportunity to thank CERN for its invaluable contribution to Physics Without Frontiers through the provision of its open data and tools to enable learners in countries without access to resources to pursue their passion in physics. Physics, which is encompassed within the science, technology, engineering and mathematics known as STEM, is also widely considered to be a critical building block for a range of STEM disciplines in terms of understanding physical phenomena. By and large, STEM is a key factor for innovation and a major driver for social, economic, human and environmental development underpinning our knowledge of societies and infrastructure. From several engineers who design and build a country's infrastructure to medical scientists who develop treatments of diseases, every aspect of human life is controlled by the discoveries and the development of STEM professionals. However, as a recent COVID-19 pandemic that disabled the many economies and the anomalies in the natural world that affect daily lives globally, spend the testimony to the unharmonie between a natural and a human world. The world is susceptible to more frequent, intense and prolonged natural disasters and the new diseases and illnesses. Consequently, physics will continue to play a vital role in generating innovations not only to develop new vaccines and treatments and the climate resilient mitigation measures but also to minimize environmental destruction and increase resilience to achieve sustainable development. Physics will continue to play a vital role in meeting basic human needs, improving the quality of life and creating opportunities for prosperity on a national, regional and global level. A country's economic development and stability are dependent on its ability to develop and adopt a new scientific research and technologies through experts with knowledge of up-to-date STEM research. Undoubtedly, STEM will play a vital role in underdeveloped and developing nations that seek to reduce levels of poverty, increase productivity, improve the standards of living and experience, sustaining economic, cultural and societal growth. For those nations that are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, including developing countries and the small islands, STEM offers hope of greater resilience to destructive extreme natural events, droughts, storms, fires and other calamities. For those nations with booming economies and who have aligned their national policies with the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, basic science and engineering offers great opportunities to achieve their national targets and the transition into green economies as well as other countries on the same path. The inventions of today are altering people's lives faster than ever before. As indicated by UNESCO's science report published in 2021, it is indeed a race against time for smarter developments. In terms of both informed decision-making and also the digital economy, the transition to smarter development driven by digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics, big data, the Internet of Things and the blockchain technology defining the fourth industrial revolution is also heavily dependent on the advances in basic sciences. More and more young people are required to join the pool of STEM professionals as the needs of human continue to grow. Therefore, physics education is vitally important in addressing the challenges of getting more young people, especially young women, into the fields of science and engineering. Despite the importance of basic science and engineering has been raised by the kids, we observe the law intake of youth and STEM and the trends haven't been changed much. Therefore, there is a need to reflect on how science is brought to the classroom and at the age at which youngsters are introduced to science. UNESCO's programs in capacity building in science and engineering provide new opportunities for the introduction of science at all ages. UNESCO's global micro science experiment which I like to call a lab in a box is an example of how UNESCO encourages students in schools lacking laboratory facilities to be exposed to the exciting world of science. Practical experiments experiences are an essential part of learning science. However, in many countries these experiments are not possible in schools in the laboratories due to the high cost, due to safety sometimes, with disposal and also capacities of teachers. This project is that we aim through this project to provide hands-on science education to primary and secondary students through affordable and compact science tool kits to conduct practical work in biology, physics and chemistry. We also target early career scientists and researchers via series of hands-on training boot camps in novel basic science and engineering disciplines. As an example, we have started a series of boot camp in nanotechnology starting next year and we will continue with a minimum of two per year. We also have a new initiative for to give remote access to scientists in Africa and I will rely on ICTP to help us through these two initiatives. Ladies and gentlemen, the efforts of physics without frontiers to motivate and enable us to pursue careers in physics is the need of the time and deserve to be celebrated. Physics without frontiers is breaking down barriers to accessing physics and mathematics research and the training by connecting with the students and the scientists worldwide and with those from less represented groups. For example, from poorer economic backgrounds women and girls and ethnic minorities. I wish ICTP a great success and once again congratulations on 10 years of accomplishments through physics without frontiers. Thank you very much Kate for the invitation. Thank you Attish for all the efforts. I wish you a very successful event. Thank you. Thank you so much in mouth for that kind talk. UNESCO is always a source of inspiration and access of knowledge for us at ICTP in UNESCO. So thank you so much for joining us today. So we're now move on to our next talk which is by Professor Bobby Acharya who will be talking about the 10 years of physics without frontiers. Let me begin by thanking Dr Cazery for a very poignant presentation and we look forward to working with you on and collaborating with you on on your projects in the future. So welcome everyone I'll say again from our physics without frontiers team. Someone hasn't been mentioned yet is Margarita who is our administrator who without whom not much could really be done. So as has already been mentioned so I won't spend too much time you know physics without frontiers works to inspire train and motivate physics and mathematics university students all over the world trying to focus on science lagging countries to create the next pool of research scientists. So the aims of the most major aims of the project are to sort of expose and introduce new ideas in physics to undergraduate and master's students to give courses and training in key analysis skills and as we'll see other transferable skills. We really try to identify since we get to interact with large numbers of young students since we get to interact with large numbers of young students we have the opportunity to identify the brightest students and we also have mentoring mentorship schemes and support for further study and to support the students in their future careers. Networking is a huge part of the benefits of the program because students connect with lecturers with active active research scientists who are who can provide them with opportunities for positions or international collaboration etc and also our programs bring awareness to the universities and institutions in developing countries that are hosting them and we can emphasise the importance of physics there. Now predominantly physics without frontiers wouldn't be able to function without a large network of volunteers if we rely on our network of volunteers to provide the activity so if someone has an idea for a project in a particular region they apply to us with the idea then we help them to develop that idea into into its final form but as you can see here we have most of the volunteers are actually young postdocs and phd students from all over the world. What we actually do is a range of activities which have developed over the years which can range from theoretical courses to kind of more practical training for example hands hands-on analysis training like data analysis even hardware and experimental training in some projects we've done a lot of online courses and training we sometimes deliver specialised schools in mathematics and physics and also training in transferable skills like software and so on programming. We're called physics without frontiers not because we're talking about geographical frontiers necessarily we're talking about many different types of frontiers this could be social frontiers for example we have a bit of a focus on on the gender gap in STEM it could be geographical frontiers of course socio-political frontiers meaning we try to address underrepresented ethnicities and also have a focus on regions of conflict where it's very difficult to where education and science systems may be rather poorly functioning and also could be economic frontiers so we focus on low income and science and technology lagging countries and in the box there the list of all of the countries that we've done physically done projects in and in some of those in many of those countries we've done multiple projects and we have ongoing projects all the time so I'm emphasising here the gender gap in research so this is the global percentage of research scientists female research scientists so the brighter colours I don't know if you can see the key but yellow is around 50% and if you go down to sort of the pinkish colour at the bottom is more like 25% and this is to emphasise the problem we even though we have done projects specifically focused on women and girls in STEM the way we address the problem more broadly is that we try to maintain gender balance in all of our projects all of our activities um I wanted to emphasise briefly um our focus on areas of conflict and insecurity what happens in when there's conflict in a region it can completely destroy an entire generation of scientists so for example if you look at what's happened say in Afghanistan now there is essentially physics education is almost impossible in Afghanistan at this moment so the problems are are gross and as already been mentioned in the previous presentation you know there's a strong science sector is necessary to support growth so um yeah this has also been mentioned we're really happy that we've made it to our to our 10th anniversary um I want to thank um all of our network of volunteers around the world many of whom are connected today so thank you very much um I want to thank especially Kate and Margarita for the tremendous amount of work that they put into the program and also the other offices of the ICTP that we work with like the director's office and public information office and I'll I'll leave you with a reminder that the right to science is an actual uh is article 27 of the United Nation Declaration of Human Rights thank you Bobby okay so we will move on to um one of our first talks uh from an alumni this is Mr Muhammad Al-Lisi who will kindly share his screen and give us our talks and after the talks going forward there's a very short time for questions so if you have questions in the room you raise your hand or on zoom there is the reaction button where you can also raise your hand thank you please go ahead Muhammad hello everyone I hope you can hear me well so my name is Muhammad um I am an example of students who were supported who was supported by ICTP and physics without frontier to continue his master degree in Italy and then make it easy for me like to to continue my PhD in Germany currently so let me share my presentation so I was born originally in Gaza Strip in Palestine and I was too keen to continue to study physics and science in general I finished my undergraduate degree in 2013 from the Islamic University of Gaza and after I finished my my undergraduate I was also eager to continue my high education so on the right you can see a photo of part of Gaza City and here below you can see like some buildings of my undergraduate university then after I finished my undergraduate degree I started to prepare myself to have a scholarship and I found that ICTP offered a program with the University of Trieste to for international students to do a master degree at the University of Trieste so I got that scholarship in 2015 I was too happy however later I got sad a little bit or maybe not a little bit too much because I couldn't travel in 2015 from Gaza Strip to Italy so then I contracted to Torquetio and other number of physics without frontier and asked if there is an opportunity to get to have the scholarship or to postpone it later because traveling from Gaza Strip to Italy is too difficult as you know like in Palestine there are no airports so for my situation I had to go to Cairo and travel from Cairo to Italy and but it was not easy to be done so it was not easy to travel in 2015 so physics without a frontier could convince ICTP to let me have the scholarship in 2016 especially to have the earlier visa so usually at the University of Trieste the master program started in October every year so I could have the opportunity to come to STB in June of 2016 and have a kind of small internship supervised by Torquetio in the summer of 2016 and in that period I I knew the system in Italy and at the University of Trieste at ICTP it was like a very helpful period for me to prepare for my master's studies at the University of Trieste I would like to highlight that physics without frontier I I knew about it by the workshops and lectures that they gave in Gaza Strip over the past 10 years like you can see on the right some photos like like for example Torquetio and she came and gave some talks about Higgs boson when it was discovered and also when I moved here to ICTP like you can see in this photo I hope the point is clear here I had a meeting with my friend from ICTP whose name was Rami also he was a Pluma student and we connected with people in Gaza Strip with the students who couldn't continue their education outside or who want to continue their education outside. Here I would like to thank some people, Torquetio, Professor Jolimela and Professor Fernando Cuvedo and Professor Sandro Scandolo and Professor Pobie Acaria because like these people helped me a lot in the beginning to to spoon the scholarship and to come here at ICTP and even though like after I finished my master degree at University of Trieste I didn't want to go back home directly and look for PhD from from Gaza Strip because it would be difficult again to travel so I talked with ICTP and Physic Without Frontier people and I asked them if I can do some workshop or some internship some project to continue part of my master thesis after I finish it and after I graduated and in that period I could look for a PhD position in Europe or in US or somewhere else but in that period also I had a lot of communication with many groups here in Europe and finally I could found a PhD position at the University of Constance here in Germany now I'm talking from my office and yeah for people who don't know the city like it is it is located in the southern part of Germany close to Switzerland this is a photo for it and here you can see like my group colleagues and my my professor, Professor Mathias Fox who is expert in mod coupling theory of a glassy system. I would like also to highlight some workshops and activities that Physic Without Frontier did in Gaza Strip you can see these are these photos were taken during these workshops and activities and also Physic Without Frontier also could meet with some investor professors here and in order to enhance like how to say enhance to give us the students an overview about the current modern modern research and scientific field across the world so for me like I found like Physic Without Frontier was too helpful for me because I was supported by it in order to come to Italy and I finished my master degree in Italy and I'm too happy I could obtain a PhD position here in Germany and I plan to finish my PhD next year and so for this season like me like I consider myself as a successful story that was supported by Physic Without Frontier and for this season like I would like to say that Physic Without Frontier should be expanded and supported and it should be connected with some kind of network of members across the world and where these members like can help each other for example like to give courses online or to travel to some places where there is no much access for physics or science in general I guess this will promote science in the countries who are in need for science and research or they don't have enough opportunities to travel like students who are living there and they can't travel outside and from my side thanks to ICB, thanks to Physic Without Frontier people and I hope we can see more and more in the next few years as we could see in the next 10 years over the past 10 years and thank you for listening. Thank you Mohammed so thank you for that inspirational story and it's really big thanks to ICTP who went beyond all expectations to help support Mohammed to come to ICTP early and a big thanks to Joe Nemella for sorting and working towards sorting that out. Does anyone have a short question for Nemella in the room or on? Thanks very much. Sorry. Oh please go ahead. Thanks very much Dr Mohammed for the valuable presentation. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for your comments. Okay thank you Mohammed. We will move on to our next talk with Christine Adele who is going to be talking to us from the Philippines about the Physics Without Frontiers Physics Meetup. Please go ahead Adele. Thank you. Hi Professor Atish, Dr Kate, Professor Bobby and everyone there and also Margarita everyone there at ICTP on Zoom. Can you see my screen? Yes thank you. All right. So hi everyone. I'm Adele and it's an honor to present to you the impact that Physics Without Frontiers is making in the Philippines through the Physics Meetup. So PWF actually partners with Central Medinau University which is a public institution located in the rural province of Bukidnon in the southern part of the Philippines and together with PWF they create collaborative spaces for students in rural areas to meet and learn from prominent international scientists. So the PWF Philippines is actually a community of more than 50 volunteers with diverse backgrounds and from different regions in the Philippines. So we have volunteers who are students, teachers and even a diplomat. So many of the volunteers are here on Zoom and I just want to give them a special shout out for their hard work and a dedication to promoting Physics in the Philippines. And we also have 25 partner science organizations in schools which really help us expand our reach to as many students as possible especially in the rural areas. So our initiative actually started with a simple question for our students. So when we asked them who their favorite physicist or scientist is, many answered Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galloli in a few mentioned Marie Curie. But when we asked them if they know of any living scientist they could hardly give any answer. So the same happened when we asked our physics alums who are now teaching in high school or college. So we thought that perhaps the limited knowledge of living physicists, the different career options and the limited understanding of the impact that the current generation of scientists has in making our world a better place to live in, all contributed to making physics unappealing especially for those in remote areas. So PWF Philippines actually provides exciting opportunities for those who have limited access to science to meet and interact directly with living physicists thus exposing them to a diverse array career options and exciting fields in physics. So while it is very difficult for us to invite international icons in physics to book in on an incredible resource came with the pandemic. So online platforms such as Zoom and Facebook bridged existing physical and geographical barriers which made us possible to invite scientists to our sessions conveniently from anywhere in the world. So from a small initiative in Bukidnon, PWF Philippines has grown to bring together physics students and teachers from all over the Philippines. So we have hosted 14 international physics science icons such as Nobel Laureate in Physics Professor Donna Strickland, the NASA interdisciplinary scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope Professor Rohir Winhordz and the breakthrough prize for fundamental physics laureate, Dame Jocelyn Bernell among many others. So in our 15 sessions including a back-to-back session with physics teaching professor emeritus Roger Friedman of the University of Physics, we have accommodated more than 6,000 participants on Zoom with more than 80% being students and our live stream on Facebook has reached more than 87,000 people. So with most of the current opportunities to access science concentrated in the national capital region where Manila is located, providing a platform for those outside the capital became our intention. So the increasing number of participants from the island of Mindanau where 69% of the participants are from, including those from the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanau, also from that to Iguas Indiginas People's Integrated School became more meaningful for us. So PWF has tremendously supported us in the Philippines, one of which is through a grant for mobile data assistance benefiting 1,242 students at the moment from rural public schools. So through mobile code data these students could access the internet during our online sessions for free. So making the program more inclusive and empowering. So one student from Mindanau actually shared that the grant enabled him to get inspiration from the scientists and motivation to pursue a science degree and eventually a career in the future. Now since most of the schools are now back to conducting face-to-face classes, our partner schools and organizations created ways for the students to access the sessions live and participate. So we have schools such as the Enaka National High School, a Kansan National High School in Bukidnau and also students at Central Mindanau University converted classrooms, covered courts, and audio-visual halls to streaming venues. So the Zoom meetings are actually converted or projected on TVs or screens so everyone could watch together and learn from the experts and interact with them. So what PWF is doing in the Philippines has really created an impact that cuts across different physics learners. So with their consent we are sharing some testimonials from our participants and volunteers. So we have an example, Mr Hinayon. So Mr Hinayon started volunteering during his physics undergrad. So the program motivated him to continue with his course and now he is teaching physics to high school students. Ms Fuenteros on the other hand is a physics teacher from Malikbog Agricultural High School. She shared that her experience whenever she joined physics meet-up, she always looks forward to meeting international scientists that she is only familiar with from books or the papers that she reads and she got to share her experiences with her students. We also have Julian Tamayo who has been our volunteers since he was still with Bacolansiki National High School. So after attending numerous sessions not only did she get to listen to the lectures of iconic scientists but she also got to interact with them and even asked for advice. So she is now pursuing an astrophysics degree for her undergrad at the University of California San Diego in the US under a scholarship. So not only did PWF provided a platform to interact with icons in science to help students from rural areas in the Philippines to appreciate physics but PWF also gave volunteers and participants the inspiration and motivation to continue and pursue physics as a degree and career. So our contribution to the accessibility of science not only did rich schools in rural areas but they also made rounds through the regional and national news. So for example our session with Nobel laureate Professor Donna Strickland informed the general public of her contributions to physics and the application of her work to for example medical eye laser surgery. So interestingly in that news a worker who underwent laser eye surgery was interviewed and then the reporter segued it to introduce the concept of short pulse amplification. So this created an innovative way of telling the public that physics contributes to the development of humanity. So we still do wish to continue you and especially in making physics or science more accessible to students in rural areas of the Philippines. So we want to create posters for example about our guests, their field, their notable achievements in our own or vernacular language and distribute them to rural schools for posting and for the students to see. We also hope to partner with more STEM public schools to encourage them to pursue physics degrees and careers. With the support of the physics without volunteers and even our partners and volunteers and amazing guests we are excited to make all these things happen and all to create opportunities for Filipinas to have access to physics through encounters with international scientists and exposure to different physics career options. So on behalf of Central Mindanau University and the physics meet up team and some of them are here on zoom. I would like to congratulate PWF on your 10th anniversary and you want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for really having the passion to promoting physics to developing countries and including the Philippines. So thank you very much. Thank you Adele. Okay do we have any question for Adele? Please. Thank you. This was really a wonderful presentation and a great effort you're doing. I'm curious seeing that you organized these online lectures for the whole Philippines. Did you encounter difficulties with the background level in homogeneous? How did you deal with that for the same lecture of let's say a known physicist? Yeah thank you very much for that questions actually very valid and yes we encountered similar challenges but we actually disclosed to our speaker that the audience are the general public. So encourage them to level down their presentation so that it would be understandable to the layman because our intention really is for the public to help appreciate physics and when they appreciate physics especially those students they will get to understand that yes they could be physicists in the future or they could take careers also in physics. So yeah that's one challenge about we are grateful that our scientists really are doing their best and you know they're experts and they could actually do a lot of things in making their talks more appealing also to the public and understandable to students even though they are still high school students. Yeah thank you for that question. Thank you Adele and thank you so much for your and your your team's inspirational work in the Philippines. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay we have our last talk of the session before the cake session with the coffee and this will be by Mr Parsi Shamar from the Royal University of Bhutan. Hello Parsi. Hello am I audible? Yes we can hear you. A very good morning good afternoon and good evening to all the speakers and attendees around the world. So with this I would like to share my slide so I hope my slide is visible. Thank you. Yeah okay first of all I would like to thank ICTP PWF team for giving me an opportunity to speak on this very important day of PWF. This is indeed an excellent opportunity for me and I'm incredibly grateful to be part of celebrating 10 years of physics without frontiers. Congratulations for achieving 10 years of physics without frontiers. So if I introduce myself I'm Parshuram Sharma and associate lecturer and program leader of physics at Sheriff's College Royal University of Bhutan. I'm going to talk about the online training in high energy physics in Bhutan that was a training on data analysis using particle physics data from atlas experiment at CERN in collaboration with Dr Kate Shaw and her team from ICTP PWF. So if I talk about the brief history of Sheriff's College Sheriff's College in data was established in 1968 as a public school and in 1976 as a junior college under the University of Delhi India and in 2004 Royal University of Bhutan was established currently there are 10 colleges under Royal University of Bhutan. So Sheriff's College indeed is the only college in Bhutan which offers undergraduate physics program. BSc in physics generally a three years program was started in 2017 before that it was a combined courses such as physics chemistry physics mathematics and physics uh sorry chemistry physics. So here we mostly teach the fundamentals of physics and physics as a whole in Bhutan is used in theoretical approach. So what do the students do after graduation? So majority of our students try for the civil services exams. Some students join as high higher secondary school teachers and some other try for a master's program in India and other parts of the world. So you can see some of the pictures out here. So I have inserted the Bhutan map here. This is the capital city Thimphu and you can see Tashi Gang here towards the east. So this is a place where our University College is located. This is a top view of Sheriff's College a recent photo and this is a front view of Sheriff's College. Hierarchy physics program in collaboration with ICTP physics without frontier. So getting connected to Dr Ketshaw was in fact a bone for the college. How did we get connected with the Dr Ketshaw? In fact it was our Vice Chancellor Dasu Nidubdoji, who met with Dr Ketshaw in Thailand sometimes in 2018. So he introduced us to Dr Ketshaw. Likewise we started our conversation with Dr Ketshaw in 2019 and in fact in the conversation we have discussed the status of physics program in Bhutan. Dr Ketshaw and her team from ICTP PWF had planned to visit Bhutan to render the support and training to the students and faculty members of Sheriff's College but the sad part was COVID deteriorated our plan. The main objective of ICTP PWF was to motivate educate and train university students studying physics or mathematics in the required field worldwide particularly focusing on science and technology lagging country. Thus Dr Ketshaw and her team initiated the online training. The project was actually intended to provide the hands-on training to BSc physics students of Sheriff's College Royal University of Bhutan on data analysis using data that are or were generated at CERN. Students of Sheriff's College attended the program on collider physics using at last open data. So program was organized by Dr Ketshaw scientist at ICTP and I was the internal coordinator at Sheriff's College. We had 60 students and all were from third year from 60 students 10 were boys and six were girls who attended the 16 weeks online program. So what are the programs and activities as well as the objectives and challenges that our students faced in this training? So in this program students were in fact trained in particle physics as well as in advanced data analysis using proton-proton collision data from the at-last experiment at CERN. The main objective was on data analysis training and to learn machine learning concept and also to apply the curve based analysis to search for the dark matter. For the first three sessions students were introduced to the fundamentals of python programming and also to the introduction of particle physics. There were in total 16 sessions in which two hours was allocated for each session. Students here learned to use the tools and perform their final projects to search for the dark matter using curve based analysis and machine learning. The only challenges faced by the students was the use of machine learning too because to be honest most of our students lacked the programming fundamentals especially the python programming and the machine learning. Maybe that was the only challenge maybe because of that it was the only challenge faced by our students. Anyways after successfully completing the 16 weeks program the wonder thing was the final findings were presented in the form of poster and we are really delighted to see the progress and achievement of our students. So you can see some of the photos out here. The first picture shown aside that was the introduction part given by Dr Keatshaw. He was in fact introducing us our students about the fundamentals of particle physics as well as the machine learning. This was the same thing and you can see the third picture out here students doing some poster presentation. In this poster presentation there were other faculties from other departments especially the life sense mathematics department as well as the head of department of science was present during the poster presentation. So poster presentation photo session and the certificate awards. In this training after completing the training I have divided the 16 students into four groups each group consisting of four students and we have asked those four groups to come up with different posters on search for the dark matter using the concept of machine learning as well as the cut based analysis and students wonderfully presented the poster. So I have displaced these four posters out here the different posters. All the posters in fact talks about the search for the dark matter. So this was a photo session after completing the session with Dr Keatshaw and we have our head of science department of science and I was also present as well as other faculty members and the students of BSc physics third year as well as other programs. Here you can see the students actively engaged in the poster presentation. They did a wonderful poster presentation and after completing all this thing we had a final photo session with the students out here after awarding them the certificates. So this program was really wonderful. Students were overwhelmed attending the program as they got to learn some basic concepts or a course of particle physics such as basic concepts structure of matter and fundamental interactions. The use of machine learning tool and the cut based analysis was although challenging for some of the students but I can say it was very useful should they plan for the further studies in particle physics related field. One of our students also expressed that physics is not only the things we learn in the class it is something more that we can see and apply in the real world. Here of department of science who attended the poster presentation also said that such program is a very first kind in Bhutan particularly in physics and thank the coordinator for the same aspecting a very similar high level programs in the near future. So what are the what were the impacts in fact for both the students as well as the students. I can say the impact after attending the program was very used and this was a very first kind of program we have ever conducted at share of the college Bhutan. So out of 16 students who attended the program four are planning for their master's program in particle related fields two are doing intern in the tech park Bhutan in the programming field advancing in python programming and machine learning. Honestly speaking after entering the program some of the students are really interested in this programming field they really wanted to learn programming up to the high level especially the python as well as the machine learning. Like us two are working in the automatic strict light controller circuit using release and LGR at share of the college and this is a great success I have to say because students applied the concept of the programming and we are working on it and there is a successful story as well. Some are planning to go for the medical physics related fields and others are preparing for the civil service jam of Bhutan. Now to as a university as a world the impact to understand and determine the most fundamental building blocks of matter and their interactions for the university like ours share of the college is extremely important. Why because students will learn to solve challenging problems in a very competitive environment. Finally we still have some further plans with ICTP the program that we conducted earlier was the first fees and the second fees of the project will be dedicated towards faculties of physics program share of the college and will be provided capacity building training on curriculum development development of laboratory and resource infrastructure facilities for both undergraduate as well as master's level because we also have a plan to start masters very soon in the future. The faculty members will also be introduced to some of the proper mechanisms for building bilateral cooperation as well as the collaboration with other international and academic institutes and industries around the world. Thank you and pleasure delay. Thank you. Okay. Do we have a question for Parsi? Thank you Parsi for that wonderful talk. It's so nice to hear the students enjoyed because this was all done remotely in 2021. We never met the students so it was all done over zoom. Do we have any questions from zoom or in the room? Maybe I've got a question for you Parsi. So do you think you're going to go forward with the curriculum of including more aspects of particle physics or indeed more data science such as the programming in python or machine learning that we did during our course? Okay. Right now we have a three years program here BS in physics program. We have a plan to start the four years BS in physics program and we are planning to include the high level of particle physics as well as the python programming in our program structure because I can see the interest shown by the students as well as the faculty members out here and they are indeed they were really happy to be the path of to see such programs conducted by the ICTP team. And you mentioned the masters program. Do you know when that will be up and running for students to enroll? We tentatively have a plan to start the master program in 2025. Perfect. We're starting the master program in 2025. Wonderful Parsi. Well thank you so much for your work and all your work you're doing to promote physics in Bhutan. Let's thank Parsi and all our speakers again. Okay we will take a short break so everybody on zoom you may go and have a cup of tea maybe a slice of cake if you have one in the bridge. Here at ICTP we have some birthday cake to celebrate with you all. So we will start back sharp at 230 Italian time. Thank you. Everybody I hope we've had a nice break. Nice cup of tea. We're lucky enough to have some birthday cake here at ICTP. We're trying to post some cake out to you all after the session. Okay so let's kick off with our next session. We're going to be hearing from Dr Mohamed Alrub about particle physics in Palestine. Hi Mohamed. Hello go ahead Mohamed. Okay thanks a lot kids and I will speak about physics without the frontier in Palestine difficulties and reach. So first of all I would like to thank the organisers kids and Bobiach area for inviting me to talk about again the physics without the frontier in Palestine. So my name is Mohamed Alrub and I am a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Oklahoma in U.S. and I am based at CERN. Okay so let's start. So it was an idea and someone with us that in by Dr Kate Shaw and she suggested to do some part of the activities inspired by the international master class and she to me and she suggested that project and honestly I was very suspicious or unsure whether it came or not. Anyway she insisted and we went forward and it was not straightforward to organise such a project. Took us six months to organise it. We needed funding. We needed volunteers to travel to Palestine. We contacted universities and actually it was very hard to convince the universities to participate in such a project. For example Birzette University accepted immediately the proposal but other universities took so much time and finally three universities agreed Al Quds University in Al Quds Birzette in Ramallah and Najah University in Nablus. In addition we contacted a high school university in Ramallah. It's a Ramallah high school for girls and accepted to let us talk to the girls for one hour or to speak about let's say particle physics in general. Okay so we went to Palestine with three universities. One full decision at each university. Four lectures in particle physics, atlas and particle division accelerator physics and opportunities in physics abroad. We had hands on fish using atlas open data and finally at the end of the day we had a virtual tour to atlas control room where the host was Steve Goldfarb and at the end of the day a day final ceremony and redistributed certificates. Four volunteers participated in the section. They showed the organizer, me, Ahmad Basalat and Sharif Gheithan. I highlight Sharif because he volunteered by himself and also he managed the funding to travel. Okay so it was very successful a session despite the difficulties and I have an iconic photo taken at Al Quds University and the three of the students participated in that session. Currently these days they are post doctoral doctors in Germany. One of them was Maazouz Ernimat who came to southern 2012 as summer student. Then went to the ICT as diploma student. Then she got her PhD in particle physics at Bonn University and now she's in Zevon. Asma and Sabrin they did their master degree at Al Quds University and they finished their PhD in nanotechnology and they are at Ulish research center in Germany. Okay in 2013 we made a small session because we were experimenting. So one session was at Biry Zitt University and a virtual tour. But that year Keitschow and with the organizers from Bir Zitt, Dr Wafahadur, talked about a particle physics course, online course. So they started that course. The lecturer was a professor Boobie Acharya and the tutor was Bir Zitt but of course Keitschow was traveled for six months. And I saw 43 of the students participated in that course currently in Europe. So actually one of them in America, Ahmad Bannina, he finished his PhD in nuclear physics and currently in U.S. Mohammad Faraj. Now he's a postdoctor at the ICT. His name she's a postdoctor doing a detector development in Paris and one of the girls called Suhad, she managed our finished master degree in physics at Bir Zitt University. She was a summer student but of course she didn't pursue her graduate studies. Of course the particle physics course was repeated in 2014, 2015, 2016 and so on. So in 2013 as I said Boobie Acharya and Keitschow, 2014 Keitschow and David Marsh, 2016 it was taught by Giraffe and other tutors like Lucas and Eric and in 2021 Marwanine Najar who was a former student at Bir Zitt University. And currently we have another course called General Relativity by George Obed. So one of the activities organized during the particle physics course or part of the particle physics course is a trip to CISME project in Jordan. It was organized in 2015 by Keitschow and you see the students in front of the main building there. Standing the program, the physics without frontier, I mean organized in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and during COVID we couldn't get on and many universities participated. So we started by a Najarath Bir Zitt course and we have the American Arab University, many students and many people volunteered like for example Mahmood State, Marwanine Najar or some of the students or volunteers who moderated, organized the particle physics without frontier were former students who joined in 2012 and 13. So let me speak about the impacts. Many universities as I said participated in the program regularly. Particle physics course also taught regularly every year. Students become aware of high energy physics activities and opportunities. And of course it's like a snowball. One or two students inspired to persuade their graduated studies advice to be or come to CERNA as summer students or travel abroad and of course they encourage their colleagues and more colleagues encourage more colleagues. So it's like a snowball effect. Rough estimate there are 30 Palestinian students doing PhD master degree or postdoctors abroad and I'm sure if I check my Google Drive or if Kate or Bobby checked their Google drives we will find a comprehensive list with all names and their achievements. So here I have a collection of photos with the students like Ma'Azuza who was a former student or Tasneam or a photo from Arab American universities and or different volunteers. We have many many photos with volunteers with the students excited and happy to participate or volunteers even to talk to students and inspire them. That's it. Thank you very much. Thank you Mohammed. Thank you. Do we have any questions for Mohammed? On Zoom you can raise your hand with the reaction button. OK. I think we have a question from Ahmed who has also been working with physics opportunities for many years at Anna Jar. Ahmed please go ahead. Yes. Hello. Good evening from Nablus from Palestine. So thank you very much Mohammed and Kate and Bobby for this very nice initiative and project. So in this slide I'm staying with Kate and Hadil and Arwa in 2014 where I participated with this activity as a volunteer and actually then I would like to share with you that this initiative has a good impact in Palestine. So it is it has let me say well reputed or good reputation on many aspects. I back to Nablus in 2016 and we initiated also a winter school in such domain and the physics and the high energy physics activities become more aware in Palestine and that's really a milestone that we can count on and we can even develop it more. So thank you all for this kind effort Bobby and Kate and Mohammed and we'll appreciate it from from our side in Palestine. So hopefully we can go on even with other projects. Thank you Ahmed. So for people that don't know Ahmed's in the bottom right there he came on several of the trips to train students across Palestine. Thank you Ahmed. Any other comments or questions for Mohammed? So how we just to say how many students do you think now on to further study from for Palestine? I mean 30 perhaps more. Thank you and I see Hadil who is another of the people in the photos who worked I think it was in 2016 with physics opportunities. Go ahead Hadil. Hello. Good afternoon. So my name is Hadil Abiyarab. I'm the head of the physics department at the Najah University in Nablus. So you see me here in the photo on the top right. So at the physics department at the Najah University actually we are always open for collaboration and further collaboration. We have very strong relations with CERN and other international institutions. So thank you for this for your initiative at the ISTP. We are always here open motivated for for future collaboration. Thank you Hadil. Yes, we're looking forward to visiting again soon. You are more than welcome. Thank you. Anybody else that has got a hand raised? Okay, thank you so much Mohammed and to everybody for your comments talking about physics in Palestine. We will move on to our next talk by Dr Reina Camacho who's going to be telling us about high energy physics across Latin America. Please go ahead Reina. Hi, can you hear me? Can you hear me well? Yes, thank you Reina. Perfect. Okay, just let me enter full screen. So thanks a lot for the invitation. We are really happy to be here celebrating with you this 10 years anniversary and I'm giving this talk actually on behalf of many people who've flown and run and supported the activities that we have been running in Latin America since 2016. This is a story about creating networks. This is a story about collaboration in particular virtual research and learning networks in order to support the accessibility to resources, the modernisation and also the internationalisation of the different institutions in Latin America. A story about how the Physics 2.2 year programme has supported our efforts in particular with two main programmes. The road shows in Latin America wide. This will be the first programme that we will be discussing that we will be presenting that took place mostly between 2016 and 2020 and also a second one that is the advanced lectures on theoretical physics that started this year and will be running in 2023 and 2024 as well. So maybe before going into the details about this project and about this programme, let's put a little bit of context about the situation in Latin America. Latin America is big so we have 20 million square kilometres. We have 33 countries, more than 650 million people and around 0.001% of them are researchers. Globally let's say in average we have less than 0.7% of the GDP that is spent in science in these countries and there is a very solid physics schools in most of the universities that were created in the 40s and in the 50s. But being that big is a very heterogeneous development and situation in the different countries and even not only between different countries but also the country itself. There are big differences between the big cities and the universities that you can find for example outside the main cities. So one of the things that is important to point out is that in particular the field of high energy physics, high energy cosmology and astro-particle physics communities has been growing a lot in Latin America in the last decades and this is thanks to different programmes and to different experiments like for example the fact that the observatory PIROJ in Latin America in the south has contributed a lot to this development. We also had a couple of exchange programmes between Europe and Latin America supported by the European Commission like Helen the High Energy Physics Latin American European Network and E-Planet the European Particle Physics Latin American Network that help a lot with mobility for Latin American researchers and this really gives a boost to the HECAP community in the region. So much that right now we have more than 1,000 researchers in this field and we are starting to organise ourselves and recently a couple of years ago we had the first strategy forum for research infrastructure for HECAP in Latin America so this is a very important step for the community in the region. However the development is heterogeneous and varies country by country but it has a lot of potential in the sense that there is a critical mass of teachers and researchers in several universities that are interested in continue pushing and strengthening the field in the region. There is a diversity of interest and a skill that has been developed in the last few years because in many universities and in many countries we are participating in big collaboration in big experiment at LHC and the observatory PIROJ etc. There is a young generation with potential and especially with a lot of eagerness a lot of interest to learn to participate in this research field and the most important thing is there is the eagerness to collaborate and collaboration make us stronger. So one thing that started on one program that that started in 2014 was the virtual center of HEP aesthetics on Cevale 2 VE so this actually was something started by a group colleague of students that of postdocs let's say finished finishing the PhD group of penesuelans doing postdoctoral studies many of them actually were part of these programs that I mentioned before Helen and the planet and we wanted to bring particle physics to Venezuela so we created Cevale 2 VE to promote the scientific dissemination education and research of higher energy physics. The important thing is that this community grew and it was extended to institutions beyond Venezuela, institutions in Colombia and Peru in addition researchers from other countries also joined the community researcher from Colombia from Ecuador Mexico joined us as a part of of the community and this extension was part of physics without frontier actually the fact that we got to create this this community within Cevale so what Cevale did was four editions of a postgraduate 60 hour course introduction to particle physics that has open material online courses and we had more than 120 students but the activities were online right so we were given the courses etc and we were missing the the possibility to meet the students to meet the people in Colombia and Venezuela in Peru in Mexico that were following the courses and physics without frontier actually gave us the possibility this possibility that we were missing thanks to the road shows and then since 2016 until 2019 we were running annual visits to several countries like for example the first year we were visiting Venezuela Colombia and Ecuador in 2016 we also visit Peru in 2018 Argentina and Uruguay became part of the road show and then 2019 we also included Mexico for example so this was a great opportunity to continue strengthening and growing this network that we were created the road shows include a lot of activities seminars conferences hands-on sessions where the students analyze LHC the large hydrocollider open data also career and opportunity session in higher energy physics and even master thesis collidation projects where an output a result of these connections that the road shows allow us to to to do so increasing and strengthening the network and reaching more students and teachers in the region I cannot say enough how much grateful we are for the program but also for all the to all the people and the local the local researchers in the in the different countries that we visited that made this possible and help us organizing all the different visits so here you have some some pictures about some pictures from the different visits that that this road shows or the different activities within this road shows for example you have a visit that we did in Lima in 2017 Lima Peru in Bogota Colombia in 2019 Caracas Venezuela in 2016 I wish you want this to mention one of them of the quoting one of the students that participated very actively in the courses of Sevalia and also in the road show Manuel Morgado who mentioned that the experience told us the importance of working in collaboration with other researchers in the country as well around the world to efficiency perform this task at the university Simón Bolívar the students are looking forward to repeating this fascinating experience and this actually this was in 2016 and this actually motivates us a lot to continue this road show through the years in particular I think this is the opinion of Manuel is very nice because Manuel is now in in conjunction with other of the students that participate in this road shows and in the courses of Sevalia they have a group that are now running activities actually with the CTP ICTP as well so it's a network that grows and bring more activities which is which is great to see um some other pictures from so from from this visit and here I wanted to to quote one of the professors actually uh that helped us in the organization uh from Bucaramanga uh Colombia he mentions that at the university industry and University of the Santander in Bucaramanga Colombia we have benefited a lot from the effort of Sevalia too with a student from our emerging astro particle group participating in the two editions of their particle and detector physics course as well as the physics without frontiers program from the lectures the projects and the interaction within structure we have profited from their first-hand experience in detector physics and data analysis we immediately apply these skills to several local projects in particular our new telescope to study volcanic inner structures in Colombia thanks to the group of enthusiastic and dedicated researchers our group has become a very active in astro particle fields so this is just one example of the important of the work that physics without frontiers has been doing and thanks to this network that we have been created right now we have now in a we are now in a second phase let's say of the community we managed to get some funding from the European Commission in particular a program that is called Erasmus Plus and we created a program that is called Latin American Alliance for Capacity Building and Advanced Physics or for short Laconga Physics that has us objective to modernize education system in four countries in Latin America so we have participating in institutions in Colombia in Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela we have a virtual learning platform remote teaching laboratories scientific and technical internships are also part of the program and as a proof of concept we have created a one year of common and institutional master degree in the universities that are participating in Latin America so we went from one course of 60 hours to a full year master program and all this network strengthening and creation was thanks to to the support of the program actually ICTP is one actually of the partners of the Laconga Physics project that has an initial station funding from 2020 to 2024 so uh let's move to to the second project that that is part of the activities in in Latin America which is the advanced lecture on theoretical physics is a project led by Daniel Galvis from the Tsinghua University he's in Bond right now and together with ICTP Physics Without Frontier and the University of Los Andes in Venezuela and a huge and great set of features and special lecturers they put together a series of lectures on theoretical physics for Latin American students they also provide mentorship for students and sessions of career opportunities so here you can you can see some pictures of the the first courses on QFT that took place in 2022 here you have some of the students that were participating in the quantum field theory course so it's really a great list of lectures and special lecturers and special guest lecturers as well so if you if you want to check the background material of the slides you will find more information about them the courses has a final exam and homework so therefore they can they can validate and they can get a credit in the in the universities for their courses so here you can see the different courses that they have planned uh in in the next few months so they will be running from this year until 2024 uh so mark your calendar because I mean they have put a lot of efforts and it's really a great a great agenda that they have for these courses and if you're interested uh the application for the quantum gravity and geometry and topology in physics courses are open right now so thanks a lot this made me to to to the end and instead of summary of a summary I just wanted to say we just wanted to say thank you and cheers to many more years motivating and training physics and mathematical students worldwide and cheers to more networks collaboration and interesting science thanks a lot thank you reina thank you reina for covering that incredible tour around all the fantastic work you and others are doing around latin america over these last few years and all that incredible impact and the new initiatives you've been working on and thanks for also sharing some of the other work from other physics about frontiers volunteers okay do we have any questions um I see on zoom we have a hand up from alvary hi alvary okay how are you hi reina that that looks excellent I just wanted to ask you a small question when are you visiting Guatemala we would be very happy to to arrange for that and we will be very happy to to visit that I think we can organize a world show I'm very happy to to put you in touch with the right people and um it's amazing what you guys are doing it's really impressive perfect let's let's discuss offline about that we are very interested also right now we are thinking about the new activities and and the and the la conga physics uh at 2.0 so we're thinking about what to what to do and we were we will be very interested uh we are having contact with some people in central america um we are we will be very interested in uh in actually responding and bringing some of the institutions to to work with us so congrats bobby of course if we can support the project in some way please let us know of course reina and alvaro thanks for excellent thanks a lot bobby yeah I was going to ask reina if you have more plans uh in collaboration with central american institutes and students uh so again we have been in discussion with some with some colleagues um in in on duras um about bringing some institutions into la conga we actually we had a couple of students uh from duras joining la conga just listening to the course and participating to the course so we are we are thinking in that direction actually um they uh central america has been also very active in the in the last free effort which is the forum for the the strategy in latin america for large infrastructure so we are going that direction and I think Al Toro you had some connections or some workshops in Honduras maybe a few years ago was it two years ago now anyway we're here more about uh more from him later yes I I saw him connected earlier yeah I think he is okay thank you so much reina you really did cover a huge amount of material there and thank you to you as I say and your team you've just done an amazing amount of work across the continent and the new initiatives I'm funding you found has been really impressive and inspirational I think to everyone so thank you thanks again okay so we will now move um staying actually in latin america up to Guatemala so dr alvrey valise will be talking about programming machine learning and quantum computing in Guatemala very good very good um let me see if you can see my screen I think you can see my screen right perfect thank you right so just give me a second okay so first of all it's an absolute pleasure to to to be here with you and to see the ictp it used to be like a like a second home for me when I was when I was a younger man it's a fantastic place and I think that physics without frontiers is perhaps one of the most exciting vehicles to to bring that spirit of ictp to the world and I have to congratulate you for all the things you've done uh I'm just going to tell you a little bit about what we've been doing um with the team in Guatemala we go back to 2018 uh I met Bobby and and Kate kind of by chance in the you know in the Adriatico residence I think and we started discussing about the possibility of doing something in Guatemala and basically what we did in Guatemala maybe it's a slightly different angle from what has been done in other places and this is quite deliberate what we wanted to do was to create schools that were very handsome very self-contained and that could serve a broad range of students going from the second third year of of undergrad and not only physicists so we wanted to have physicists chemists mathematicians computer scientists and basically what we wanted to do was to give them tools that were both valuable as researchers and also if they wanted to move into industry and this is something that is very close to my heart because now I'm not working in academia I still engage in this kind of events but I'm running running a startup incubator and an adventure fund so basically what we do is that we work with a lot of physicists most of the people we work are physicists mathematicians that want to start companies in different spaces and basically what we wanted to do with these courses was to give the tools to students of physics to also go beyond the the academic realm so so far we've organized three events three short courses the first one was in in 2018 already well and it was a very nice course on practical programming really getting your python straight getting things to do right knowing how to write good code how to document it how to use github and this was supported by by by both Kate and the great card winner that it's a it's a hero for us in Guatemala and he was there with us in two schools this first school we had I think around 40 students and many of them went on to do a lot of interesting things some of them in the are doing their phd's their masters abroad and some of them are working in startups in Guatemala these I'll probably go a bit more into these the kind of support that we have also from the private sector in this one then we decided to do a follow-on on on that on that course in 2019 in 2019 again we had we had Kurt with us amazing and this time we involved a startup incubator in Guatemala and this time we focused on on machine learning and what Kurt did was also again an amazing course where we too we started with very very basic ideas of machine learning statistical learning making sure that people really learn the basics that we can transform all this knowledge from statistical mechanics from from calculus and transform it into something that could be used both for working in particle detectors that's actually how how we ended this course the particle detectors and also for working in industry and in fact we have we had a competition and this competition the winners and I don't remember exactly how it was set up but some of the winners went for for an internship in a machine learning startup that that just started in Guatemala and this was an excellent experience then we'd have we had a hiatus um in 2020 because covid and a series of things it was a bit a complicated year but then we came back on 2021 with the vengeance and we organized a very I think this one was a fantastic school in quantum machine learning and this school was actually here in this this time we tried something slightly different and I think we're going to stick to to this type of schools that we had a very very detailed propagatical course that was taught by by local professors so that they would be really really well prepared for the for the course and this was taught by I'll give him a shout out later by Joani Ramírez and two excellent teaching assistants and the course was a course on on basically the state of the art quantum machine learning and it was given by Marco Cereso that it's a researcher at Los Alamos National Lab and he's been doing amazing contributions to to the field lately and this time we accompanied the course with so this course was again very hands-on and we accompanied the course with with like with short plenary style talks by people a combination of people from industry and academia and this is where where we use our connections with with the quantum computing startups and also large players so we have Amira Bass from from from IBM we had Juan Miguel Arrasola that is the he's the guy that is running the algorithmic part of the startup call but not anymore a startup they just rest a lot of money so a scale up in in Canada that is in photonic quantum computing we had Loic Henry that works with me on the on the private sector and he's the chief technology officer of Pascal that it's a startup in Paris that does neutral atom uses neutral atoms for for quantum computing and we have a bilingual short from the University of Oxford and Vincent helped me that it's was teaching us how to solve differential equations using quantum computers was a very nice course and we're planning already next year what we're going to do next year we're probably going to go into the into the into the lower level of implementation in in quantum computing quantum control both for for quantum processors and also for experimental quantum physics like if you want to run an experiment sometimes you want to redefine the optimal parameters and we're talking to again in this spirit of both industry and and university we're talking to someone in a university and to someone in a startup that to give the course together so in this course that's a very nice highlight for us we have Marco is is a what a man student well not a student anymore and it was very nice to to get our own people kind of to get back and and that was a bit about the amazing things they're doing so our philosophy has been again there are a lot of transferable skills that are very important and we are not learning it in a systematic way people kind of catch haphazard some idea from here some idea from there and what we're trying to do is to do it as systematic as possible learn how to do things in a very in a very clear way learn to learn make sure you master the basics and that you know which things can be used outside so that way we want to make sure that students don't think that they have only one path for their careers and another thing that we have really emphasized a lot is to learn by doing so most of the courses we've organized are brutal tutorials they're really long tutorials where people have fun where they try to solve problems that are really really next it's really really important for us and also we have competitions we try to end each of the courses with the competition where students are assembled into different teams and they try to solve an interesting problem and generally there is there is some some nice reward upon winning this this competition here we have a picture from our first uh physics with a spontaneous course this is my alma mater the university of Guatemala and okay so as I was telling you another nice thing that that that came out of this is that we have a very detailed if you want also to have access we have very detailed the github repositories where we have the lecture notes we have the notebooks exercises and if someone wants to grab them of course you you can let us know and you can go through the almost the entirety of the course and and learn all the things that we did and even we have access to the data set so you can try to reproduce some of the calculations that were taught by especially by Curtis okay so another thing that has been very important for us is to bring a lot of stakeholders together not just the traditional academics stakeholders of course we worked with with three of the main universities in Guatemala we had the support of the school of physics of the national university university of San Carlos we worked with the university of Guatemala they actually were the hosts of our first school and we're also working with the university of Rafaela and Ibar that it's a university that is more focused on the humanities but we also wanted to bring science closer to to people working in in the humanities and uh in we don't want to go beyond just the academic environment and for example here we organized a nice event uh with with Curtin and with Kate this was in in Guatemala it was in a cool bohemian place basically people having drinks people this generally this conversatoria are about art or about history or things like that we decided to bring the people from physics without frontiers both to tell a little bit about this this amazing enterprise of bringing physics to the world and also to talk a little bit about how particle detectors are built and because we believe that one of the crucial things in in in our countries is that there is no scientific literacy beyond the the I mean we have a group of physicists they're a bunch of really smart kids and they have big dreams but also we need all the other people to know what's going on policy makers uh entrepreneurs investors etc and this is highlighted by by some of the partners we have so this is some of our private sector partners from the that that have been helping us organize the schools and have given a lot of visibility to to to the talent pool that it's in that is latent there in the in the physics and mathematics departments we have the tech that it's the first technology incubator in Guatemala uh we have foundation that it's a foundation that it's basically uh focused on on the development of knowledge neighborhoods in in Guatemala city uh we have kingo energy that it's I mean not any longer a startup but it's an energy startup from Guatemala they have some interesting business model to bring electricity to to remote communities they were involved in in supporting these courses and they employed one of our people now he was I mean I think he just moved but he was the chief data scientist of the of the startup was one of the one of the students from from this course and then we have two two startups from Europe that are actually my clients that they they work for for my firm and my firm kind of was working with them we advise them in their fundraising strategy but we became very good friends with the with the technology technology officers and they decided to give us their their time to to participate as lecturers in in our courses now the most important thing for me and I'm just going to give a shout out to four of the people that have been the most involved here first of all I have to say Juan Diego Chan I mean Juan Diego is the real is the real hero the thing is that he's very busy so so today I have to take the I have to take the presentation but Juan Diego is the the person with the boots on the ground he's been or making sure that these schools work that everything goes according to plan he's a brilliant physicist we have also joined Ramirez he is I think he's an alumni of ICTP if I'm not wrong or he's one he might be an ICTP alumni he's an excellent quantum information physicist with and he's starting a little research group that is doing super amazing things in Guatemala and then we have our latest TAs that are at Subadra Chewirria and Felipe Coroy that these are the people that organize the tutorials so that all the students are ready for for the we're facing these very challenging schools now I just wanted to wrap up I wanted to keep it brief so we can talk and I just want to say many congratulations happy birthday and keep up this this mission that you have I'm a I'm a huge fan of what you guys are doing and whenever you need my help in any way I'm always available for you thank you Alvary thank you that's a fantastic talk your team and yourself have done an incredible job over the years and the way that you really focused on technology and knowledge transfer transferable skills and how you made this connection with local industries it's really interesting and I think many other programmes would love to learn from you to see how they can mimic some of these wonderful tools that you use okay do we have any questions for Alvary I see we have a hand up from Desmond Desmond please go ahead thank you very much Alvarez I'm very happy for the presentation please I just wish to find out I have been very interested in machine learning and you just said you want to get more information concerning that we could get you how can we get that information please sure so I'll give you my email I'll put it here in the chat it's like my chat I'll put it in the chat I cannot see the chat now but I promise I'll put it as soon as I stop sharing right to me and I'm happy to share with you information both on the like the github's that we have for the basic introduction and also advice that we've given to students that want to continue learning a little bit more about machine learning and really get up to speed to what is going on now it's like I'll put it in the chat thank you yeah and we should mention that all the all the materials made by physics without frontiers are actually all available to be shared around so if there's any projects that you're interested in and you'd like to ask for their materials we're very happy to share between all the projects so that you can you know use each other's materials and resources thanks so Alvarez I was going to ask you so you've done what was it practical scientific computing you've done introduction to machine learning and now quantum computing I'm very interested to hear where the program will be going next yeah so our our plan is to so I'm now guiding it a lot for the startups I'm supporting on my kind of day job where I help them fundraise and there is a startup that is based in Finland and what these guys are doing is that they have some very cool Bayesian methods to control quantum hardware but the thing is that the Bayesian tools are amazing for a bunch of other things so I think we're going to organise a course on Bayesian based Bayesian based very hard to pronounce quite a multiple control and we'll probably have two angles one on methods for experimental physics and one on hardware design so this is I think the next thing we're going to do that sounds amazing Bobby's giving a thumbs up in in particular okay any last comments questions if not thank you so much Alvarez for giving up your time and talking to us today and thank you so we will be moving on to the next speaker today which will be Professor Sahal Yakub so he's from the University of Cape Town and he will be talking to us about promoting women in physics in South Africa hi Sahal can you hear us hi yeah I can hear you I'm just working through the details of sharing my screen I think it's best if I do it this way oh there we go okay can you see my screen lovely yes we can thanks perfect sorry about the delay and thank you for for the invitation it's really nice to be here to help you celebrate this the great work you've been doing I just need to put on a disclaimer I'm currently on call so if something drastically goes wrong with the piece of the detector that I'm in charge of I will have to just pause or stop so hopefully that won't happen so I'm based at the University of Cape Town and that's based in South Africa which I hope everyone here is familiar with but I stolen these slides from when I first presented this work to a different audience so of course South Africa is at the southern part of Africa our demographics are we're up to about 61 million people 51 percent female 36.2 age between 15 and 34 most households have access to water and access to electricity but access to water in this case might mean a communal tap in the in the middle of the village for some of you might not know we had our first democratic election in 1984 prior to that we were a society segregated by race we are 8.1 percent white which is the official classification used in South Africa and it just means a previous person previously from Europe about 20 percent of the population cannot afford food and there's 20 percent of all households we have about 35 percent unemployment and about 55 percent of the country is below the poverty line so the poverty line is considered 58 us dollars per month and a case of beer for example is 12 dollars approximately and one last thing that's not on the slide is that 60 to 65 percent of the wealth of the population is held within 10 percent of that population so that's South Africa and we're still a predominantly patriarchal society preference is generally given to males to the extent that while Kate and I were doing this project we heard stories about the the woman that were part of this project that helped us having to give things to their brother and being worried about not being able to study because their brother wanted to study or there was one bicycle in the household and it was obviously for the boy uh we have official policies in place to encourage previously disadvantaged groups and that is spread along all lines so it's racial and gender-based and sexual orientation-based we have a very progressive constitution but these official policies make a small difference in a big problem in as of 2011 17 percent of university leadership were women all these numbers are in science engineering and technology 21 percent of four professors were women and almost half of national and agricultural science doctoral graduates were female and 15 to 17 percent if you expand that to engineering science materials and technology's doctoral degrees so there is maybe some hope there that we have a young up-and-coming generation that will fix a lot of the imbalances that I've been speaking about sorry we have frozen there we go um in my anecdotal experience in physics I've been employed at two universities in South Africa and just to keep them somewhat anonymous although I guess you can look me up institutes A and B one had a complement of 10 physics academics the other was 15 and at one of them there were no women on permanent members of staff at the other there was one and then if we count non-white South Africans at one one of them had changed from two to one and on the other one from two to zero so not really moving in the right direction so with that in mind Kate and I worked together on a project it focused on women in physics because we got our funding from the South African Institute of Physics we have a subgroup that support women in physics and they wanted to encourage increasing diversity and addressing gender balance and we started with the idea of how does one picture a physicist and I guess you all kind of know that this is the answer this is the the popular view of a physicist is the quintessential Einstein and this is not something that students in South Africa can identify with this is a very foreign image it's somebody who's older it's somebody who's not come through what they've been through and we wanted to see could we change that idea and what effect would that have this is a more recent picture this is the South African Institute of Physics annual annual general meeting banquet dinner and so you can see from this picture that physicists in South Africa are already much more diverse than one would expect and our idea was to go through current physicists in South Africa a woman who have physics degrees and make posters about them and their journeys and then send these posters to schools whether they could be displayed and hopefully encourage people to pursue physics to let them know that people like you people who faced your struggles have done physics have graduated can do this if you see your favorite sci-fi show you you too can do that so after selection process we ended up with seven candidates reasonably diverse from South Africa these are samples of the pictures that we took with them with each of these candidates Kate and I met for a few hours I think sometimes the most was up to a well with Tana we had to the woman in the middle at the bottom we had to drive out to the site of the SKA so we spent a weekend with her so that was the most and with some of them it was maybe just half a day where Kate amongst her many skills showed her talents as a photographer took a series of pictures this is one of our subjects and just surrounded by some of the quotes that that we had from them we recorded our interviews with them we had ideas to expand this into a bigger project with links to the interviews and try to get it published but none of that eventually came to fruition and so just from these women traditionally a woman's role is to stay home and take care of the house and kids so you want to go to university and do what would that degree the type of thing that was here I think they're intimidated by women they cannot accept a woman doing better than them when my mother wanted to go to school her dad said no a woman who goes to school becomes undesirable so women don't go to school they must listen to their husband so that's how village people are raised if we have a boy and a girl and we have a bicycle then you'll find that the boy always would have the first go until he has had enough then is the girls turn a girl can't be better than you you know it starts with the small things back to the situation in South Africa even though we are no longer segregated by law this is a picture of St John's College a well-resourced school in Johannesburg at the same time in the last few years we've had an epidemic of children being injured and passing away in pitlaterines in schools in South Africa a pitlaterine is sometimes called a long drop it's just a hole in the ground that's used as as the toilet so we're still very diverse unfortunately not in in good ways and we made these posters and went out and saw some of the schools that these candidates came from they were not all from the st john's college level unfortunately we haven't been able to assess the impact of these posters they've been used often online ICTP I think has used them the South African Institute of Physics the University of Cape Town has used them they've been shared a lot particularly on days in support of women and diversity in STEM there was a plan to assess the impact of schools with the questionnaires and sampling across the various different socio-economic levels and geographies geographies within South Africa unfortunately that was just too hard to do with gaining consent appropriately from minors we would just depend too much on the people at the school and they weren't really that interested unless we combined the study to the more well-resourced schools and even then it was going to be a problem so we have 50 hard printed sets of the posters that are being displayed in schools in the Hauten province but we haven't been able to assess the impact and the posters have been taken off the SAIP website I hope we'll be able to get them put up somewhere in the future so that somebody can use them if there's value thank you very much thank you Sahal brilliant thank you so much and it's really nice to see a project completely devoted to promoting women and I think yeah these posters are all very pretty there's some printed versions outside if you want to have a look later okay do we have any questions for Sahal about promoting women in physics and this specific project in South Africa so I wanted to ask just well we're waiting to see if there's hands up Sahal I wanted to ask about um the situation it's socially in South Africa do you think things have changed a little bit from the times when those interviews were taken in the way that women in general are seen a society and do you see the path towards more equity in physics being dependent on that or do you think that we can make progress in science with equity and reducing the gender gap going forward Kate sorry that was I wasn't expecting quite a composite question so I think let me let me see if I can remember the various pieces I don't know enough about the broader South African society but the physics community is trying and the scientific community at the university level is trying particularly hard at the universities I work with and I've been involved with we've we've employed more women across the faculty unfortunately that hasn't translated in the physics department but across the science faculty it has happened and I consider that part of the win and I think we're seeing more students coming through as well so I think in in our sphere of influence we're seeing some change and maybe that echoes what's happening further down but I really don't know what's happening in the in the poorer villages right I I hope there's some change but I think the change happens generationally I don't think it's a 10 year timescale even is enough that something would have changed too much I don't remember the rest of your question yeah I know that's absolutely right it's always a difficult topic isn't it how to increase underrepresented groups in a field and then also to how to how to measure how successful different attempts and projects are but this is really nice do you have any plans for the future to work more in gender or any other underrepresented groups no I don't have any concrete plans it's it's something that I would always do given given the opportunity but I've I've changed my life a little bit in the last year so I'm now in operations in Atlas at least for the next year which is a kind of full-time best job based at CERN at the moment yes of course well good luck with run three I hope uh the detector doesn't break too badly in the next few weeks while you're on call thanks so much the whole thank you Kate so we'll move on to our last um talk of the session today this is uh by Dr Mac Hamiza Senekhane and this is going to be about quantum physics in Lesotho hi Mac Hamiza can you hear us hello Kate yes I can hear you fantastic thank you just give me a moment or so thank you oh thank you very much unfortunately my laptop I cannot share it from my laptop so I'll present from the mobile I hope that will be key with you that should be fine we might be able to share it from this side although we can see your screen quite well it's a little bit smaller they're on the indicator so I can share from my side yeah so I can share for my uh my connection here oops okay Mac Hamiza if you stop sharing I can actually see if I can share my screen and you have to tell me when to change okay okay thank you very much thank thank you well good I think in my case it's good evening good evening everybody and I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate the physics without frontiers for the 10th year anniversary so my name is Mac Hamiza Senekhane even though the slide is supposed to be presented by my colleague dr Nalili Machullo I will be the one presenting I don't see the next slide sorry Kate one moment it's um it wasn't sharing completely properly full screen that's better sorry Mac Hamiza do go ahead thank you very much may please go to the next slide thank you so our presentation with my colleague dr Nalili Machullo who could not unfortunately we could not be able to attend this event it's about the quantum computing project that we're having in Lesotho where we are trying to introduce quantum computing to other great students in Lesotho it's the project that is supported by both the physics without frontiers and the national universe of Lesotho so like I said my name is Mach Hamiza Senekhane I'm from Lesotho which is in South Africa first lately for me Professor Yakubi Hesias provided a brief overview of South Africa and Lesotho happens to be linked with South Africa so having provided that background about South Africa they also covered Lesotho so for those who might not know where this is linked with South Africa so back to this project the idea of the project was to devise the outreach program that focuses on introducing and the hands-on training on quantum computing to other great students in Lesotho so Lesotho unfortunately most of the programs are uh under great programs you don't have many postcard programs so that's why we targeted specifically under current students with background in mathematics physics and or computer science so like I said earlier the project was organized drinking with the national universe of Lesotho and the picture on the right is just one of the buildings of the national universe of Lesotho and the organizers of this quantum computing school in Lesotho are Dr. Kate Shaw, myself Mach Hamiza Senekhane and Dr. Leitimajelo who is currently still based at the national universe of Lesotho while I have moved on I'm now in South Africa at the universe of Transpect so far we have we have run two successful programs on on quantum computing school the first program project was in 2020 November 2020 and then we ran the second one last year in 2021 hopefully you have more programs to run I'll cover a bit why the challenge just that we are facing so that I could see why maybe this year we haven't had any quantum computing school yet oh please go to the next slide thank you so so the goals of the of this program are twofold the first goal is to introduce quantum computing to the unequate students in Lesotho this is because quantum computing does not form curriculum of programs within our universities in Lesotho so the only way to give students exposure is to organize that quantum computing school so that they have idea of what the field is about and maybe participate later the second goal is actually to encourage the students to feather their studies in quantum computing so that we could build the critical mass of quantum computing within Lesotho next slide please so in the first program of 2020 we hosted the event of the national universe of Lesotho because they are providing all logistical support and any support that they could offer to us so the school was attended by 34 unequate students who like I said earlier we have background in mathematics computer science or physics and or physics so from that event only two of the three universities in Lesotho participated when the domain participants be coming from the national investor of Lesotho which is the hosting institution so of the of the 34 students who attended 8.8% or three of them came from Darren visiting but university while the remainder 31 also came from the national of Lesotho in terms of gender representation unfortunately they ended up being needed by males they were like 30 males to only four women it's one of the challenges I'll discuss later that we still have the problem of women enrolmenting STEM programs even in Lesotho I think it's a global problem but thank you very much next slide so in 2020 we had a pleasure of actually encouraging women students and we get a lot of tutorials and hence on exercises where they they were expected they were requested to print their own lips so that they could run all the codes in the program using the notebooks also so this are some of the pictures that we took during the event on the top left corner we have the demonstration where we were in class and they were trying to do the exercises during the that break of exercises during the lectures so the next two pictures are actually group photos that we took after the completion of the course which this program ran for two days it was a two-day program so we can see even from the pictures like visually it's mainly dominated by males instead of women next slide please so after successfully conducting the program like hosting the program in 2020 November 2020 we had a follow-up counter-computing school in 2021 which has still hosted by the National Investor for Lesotho however relatively in terms of attendance it has relatively poorly attended as opposed to the 2020 event so one of the key challenges was that currently for the past the last year and this year Lesotho is still having a problem with the institutions of Ireland because students are protesting a lot about funding from the government so the attendance wasn't that good because of the protests that were ongoing at the time and it's also one of the reasons that we couldn't host one counter-computing school they said because because of the continuous strikes that were ongoing in Lesotho so for this event only National Investor for Lesotho participated at the University's decision to act because it wasn't logically possible for them to travel to the National Investor for Lesotho next slide please so in case we try to see the impact or the effect that the counter-computing school had especially the first cohort of students from the first cohort of students we were able to have at least one student showing interest and eventually they're enrolling for the postgraduate studies with the ICTP East African Institute for Pedimental Research I think it's in Rwanda yes it's in Rwanda so it's one of the impacts of the of this counter-computing school there are impacts or outcomes that we tried to communicate with the scientific community on how maybe for the low resource countries how can we try to promote counter-computing for the communities that might not be exposed to such built so that output was published by the South African Institute of Physics in the 2021 proceedings on the left it's the picture of the paper the abstract and the details of the topic and everything next slide please so during these two years that we tried to run this counter-computing school program we have seen some of the challenges that I think we might need to pay more attention to or maybe there might be some other colleagues from elsewhere who might provide the feedback on how we can handle the challenges the first one is about gender diversity we still have these programs been dominated by Maine and the two challenges that we are drawing from the pool that is already biased towards Maine because for the STEM enrollment in the Institute of Institutions of Eleanor we still have Maine being enrolled in higher numbers than females like like so it's very difficult to strike the gender balance in such cases maybe other programs might be or identities might be necessary to try to achieve that goal of gender balance that issue is actually the volatility of the especially of in the last two years of the Institutions of Higher Lending so organizing events like the counter-computing schools tends to be a bit more problematic more challenging than if the environment were like very calm and everything but because we are having this volatility anything can happen even if we set the dates for the event by the time we try to go for the event we may find that it's doing the strike and then it's impossible to go on with the with the program so lastly the government by in isn't it's still limited at the moment it's not so the government is not participating enough to make this initiative a success at the moment maybe with more interaction to the government and the presentations that we provide to them they might eventually by in and support the the program I think there was this last slide okay these two pictures are actually the one is what the one bottom left is about the campus the National University of Lesotho campus and the one on the right is also that building foundation of the University of Lesotho where we hosted the event the quantum computing events thank you very much for the attention thank you macameesa thank you and also we should mention how impressive it was this first project they did in 2020 was one of the only projects we managed to do during that very lockdown period they managed to hold this in Lesotho so we were very happy with their efforts in that respect thank you I'm wondering you mentioned that you had poor attendance in 21 um was online lecture on lectures an option was it feasible at the time it was invisible because according to the arrangements we wanted to it's easier to monitor the hands-on exercises when they they are in one room and then we work around to assist than when we they are online and it's not easy to collect their participation we might think we have communicated with them and that they were actually not paying attention I see yeah it's often difficult to do the advertising of these kind of events um but I think yeah going forward we should be able to tackle these things a bit better and do you have plans to um tackle the we were just talking about earlier the gender diversity um is there any way you think we could work towards getting more female participation in your programmes at the moment because we are just throwing from the policies already by us it's always it's also a challenge on our part maybe we haven't come up with the way forward but it's something that we want to achieve even though we don't know how we did great I think I've been in some programs with that we are going from two or one female students so it gets a bit difficult to balance of course yeah it's a problem that many countries face maybe we can do some sort of dedicated cross-physics what frontiers ideas on that in the future any other comments or questions burning ones no no hands up brilliant thank you so much macameesa for that really nice presentation and these wonderful quantum computing schools that are going on in the same thing so we will finish this session um and we will have yeah we will have a very short a 10 minute break so please if you're on zoom get up and stretch your legs we don't need to get hurt from sitting down too long um and we'll meet back at five past four uh time here in Italy for our first session where we're going to be hearing about Afghanistan Tanzania Malawi Ghana Nepal Kurdistan region in Iraq and Venezuela so please do join us for that final session and let's thank macameesa and all the speakers from the second session okay if everyone has arrived back from their copies tees led stretching activities so let's go forward to the third session today thank you so much to everyone for staying um for the whole session this afternoon we're going to start off today by hearing from mr bactash amini he was here at icp not so long ago working on his masters he's now at the university of fryberg uh studying for his phd and bactash will be talking today about building the path towards a physics research community in afghanistan hello bactash hello kid can you hear me yes we do please go ahead uh can you see my slides okay great so first of all uh hello everyone and i would like to congratulate the icp pwf team on the 10th anniversary of this great program and it's an honor for me to be here and give a talk and this great event on behalf of my colleagues and just saw that many of them are online here and also most of our students are also joining this program so hello everyone and i will give a brief overview on building the path towards a physics research community in afghanistan and as kate already described me i'm icp pwf coordinator and a former lecturer at the cobal university so i will begin my talk by introducing the physics departments in afghanistan as you can see in this map we have four physics departments one in herat bal cobal nengarhar universities and we only have undergraduate programs unfortunately recently in the in early 2021 the cobal university established an embassy program in nuclear physics but because of the situation that happened in afghanistan unfortunately this program is going to be cancelled and we will not have an embassy program anymore and before pwff have honest and collaboration we didn't have any research in physics and the government also did not have any interest in physics and we didn't have the facility to conduct research in physics and lecturers everyone was saturated with teaching so we didn't have research and unfortunately the faculty members also didn't have any contact with the international physics society and fortunately in in 2017 we initiated this pwf afghanistan collaboration with the intention to have a strong community of physicists in afghanistan by organizing annual intensive physics school and providing support to students and faculty members and also to facilitate other collaborations in networks with such as collaboration of afghanistan with cern so as you will see in the rest of my talk we have quite good improvements in the situation of physics in afghanistan and because of this pwf afghanistan collaboration so how this collaboration began actually in 2017 i represented afghanistan here and in this CERN Sahibi workshop held at Kathmandu University Nepal and this workshop was invited by Dr Archana Sharma and thanks to her in this workshop i met a lot of people and one of them was Ms Aba Eli who is going to represent Nepal this evening and thanks to Aba Eli she put me in contact with Steven Goldfurb and then he put me in contact with Keisha and we had this first meeting in august 2017 where we talked about organizing events and activities in Afghanistan and and we had a couple of workshops in Afghanistan back in 2018 and 2019 at Cobb University. You can see in this photo from the lift we have a faculty member Ahmad Sajad Nadari and a local organiser and then we have here NCR Fani a professor at IAS, BS in Iran and she gave us lectures on cosmology and then Keisha everyone knows her and myself and faculty member Jawad Ahmadie and also a local organiser so in these workshops we had lectures delivered by speakers came from ICTP for example below here we have Marco Salario who was a postdoc at that time at ICTP and he gave us lectures on special relativity and next to him we have Fawad Hassan who is originally from Afghanistan and currently he is a particle physics professor at University of Stockholm and he gave us lectures on quantum field theory and on top here we have Zainab Nazari she is also originally from Afghanistan and she was a PhD student at that time and she gave us lectures on group theory. Beside these lectures we had a hands-on session where I hear in these photos you can see in these two photos and myself and Kate we were guiding the participants on how to select objects in an event at the Atlas detector. So and also apart from these activities that we had with the university students we also had an outreach program with the high school students where NCIR finally gave a talk on cosmology in Persian and most of the participants were females and also in this outreach program high school students presented their projects where they made some robotics out of rubbish stuff here you can see in this photo we have Mas Harudin he is a high school student and he made this project and presented to us and here I would like to highlight that during these workshops and the PWF team also had a meeting with the ministry where we discussed our future plans and activities in Afghanistan and they were quite supportive. So here I present two group photos of the two workshops that we had in the top it is from the first workshop where we had 200 participants and in the bottom we had in the second workshop we had 100 participants and everyone was so excited because of bringing ICTP in Afghanistan everyone tagged with us and yeah I can say that these two workshops can be counted as a starting point of a revolution in physics in Afghanistan because since then money things changed in Afghanistan our students got inspired to pursue their career in physics and ICTP PWF in collaboration with Iranian universities provided MEC scholarships to our students in Iran and also more important to other important points that happened because of these workshops where the faculty members established their connections with the international physics society for example with the physicists at ICTP and also we established a network of physicists from Afghanistan and we are going to strengthen this network and I believe this network would be vital in the future to keep alive physics in Afghanistan. In 2020 we also had we actually everything was done we were planning to launch a workshop on condensed matter physics but unfortunately COVID happened but and we couldn't do that in 2021 our government collapsed and so we couldn't do anything in these two years and for the future we are thinking to organise a one-year school in the theories of physics and of course this project is now at the a scratch level and hopefully we are going to finalise it in a couple of months sooner. So ICTP PWF provided MEC scholarships in collaboration with IASBS in Iran and also FUM for Dawsi Mashhad University. Since 2019 till 2020 this program provided 20 scholarships at IASBS and one scholarship at FFUM Mashhad University and here on the top right this is a group photo of the first batch of our students that benefited from this program they are at IASBS from the left it is Haes Kazumi, Yahya Nazari, Maryam Mohamedi, Minazari, Professor at IASBS and also she is organising this this program with Kate and then we have Ismail and Javed. So from among all these students we only have five students who completed their studies back there at IASBS and fortunately three of them obtained PhD positions in particular Sharif who is not available here in this photo and Javed they obtained PhD positions in German in condensed matter physics and Maryam she is here she obtained a PhD position in Switzerland in optics and of course I see I just saw that most of these students are watching us now I would like to say that these are our students who are doing their masters at Iran institutions they are key members of our network and fortunately we are going to ask for their help for their help and future to conduct some activities in Afghanistan either it could be online or in person we will think of this they are the key members of our network and also as I mentioned in my previous slide because of these workshops the faculty members established their connections with ICTP physicists and it was beneficial in many ways for example Professor Bobby Acharya and Fawr Hassan they helped us in developing the curriculum for the undergraduate program at the department of theoretical physics and also when this collapse of the government happened in 2021 Kate showed a lot of effort to find some research opportunities for the faculty female faculty members for females and she found two research opportunities in Italy for two faculty members and here I have this photo it is a historic photo where I first visited ICTP in 2018 and I met a former director of ICTP professor Fernando Cuvido and it was there we discussed a lot of things and we were hoping at that time to achieve a lot of things and and we did actually and below here it is my colleague Ahmad Sajar Nazari and myself at ICTP we conducted our research our master's research with the ICTP Atlas group and in the support of PWF and here this is a photo of ICTP Atlas group we are from the left it is Mohammed Faraj who is currently doing his postdoc at ICTP and then Mekhela Penham into my supervisor and Yaqupo who was a PhD student back at the time and myself and my supervisor Professor Paviacharya and here we have Jawad Ahmadie who is a faculty member and he's currently at ICTP as a ICTP steppe he's doing his PhD in Condrens Matter Physics at the Assahan University and also this is this this is a group photo of the CERN summer school 2019 where I participated and so I can say because of this ICTP PWF program and a lot of things happen back there in Afghanistan if it wasn't because of this program we will not be able to be in this situation currently in Afghanistan although our government collapsed you are suffering our people everyone is suffering especially I mean our young sisters are not allowed to go to schools to high schools our students are suffering at universities because of lack of qualified lecturers but I'm hoping that if we continue and strengthen this network of physicists that we created we can keep alive at least the physics community in Afghanistan by supporting students and the faculty members. This brings me to my last slide where I would like to we are on behalf of the physics community in Afghanistan especially my colleagues and my students and also our scholarship holders in Iran I would like to thank the ICTP and ICTP physics without frontiers program especially and in particular I would like to thank Kehra and Bobby Horia for all the efforts that they put throughout these years and thank you very much. Thank you Bhattash. Do we have any questions or comments about Bhattash? Thank you for your talk it's very impressive. You mentioned some hope for the future projects would you go lower in the level considering the situation aim at high schools or are you still playing a higher level of lectures? Of course we have been working at the undergraduate level till now and our next project that you're planning is also for the undergraduate level. I mean it's not really for an undergraduate level it's for the faculty members because of this chaos that happened in Afghanistan most of the qualified lecturers fled the country so the universities had to recruit new people who doesn't have enough qualifications and knowledge to teach those advanced courses even at the undergraduate level so we are planning to organize this one-year school to teach basic theories of physics to this faculty members and also for to some undergraduate students who are graduated, BC graduate students and of course we will be happy to hear from PWF and from other colleagues or some other people to organize some programs for the high school levels and of course we will do that. The quick question did you ever find that English was an issue? Of course English is an issue back in our country and that's why we chose Iran not I mean of course Iran has excellent universities but also the language was good for our students to pursue their MSc. So we haven't seen a family she's Iranian and in the other school we had Zainab Fawad who were Afghan so most of the lectures would be either in the the language diary or it would be a little bit of English. Any other quick questions? No? Okay thank you so much back to Ashby your talk it's really inspirational what you and your your team are doing in Afghanistan and I really look forward to working at how we're going to plan more projects for 2023. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay we will move to our next talk by Dr Daniel Shadrach. He is at the SJUT Institute in Tanzania and he's going to be telling us about his programs in biophysics in both Tanzania and Malawi. Hi Daniel. Hi Kate. It's nice to meet you. Nice to see many people. I can see a lot of people from what's the contestant matter section so allow me to share the screen. I think you can see my screen right? Thank you. Yes. Yes. Thank you. I'll be sharing the overview of the biophysics in not honoring Tanzania and Malawi but us generally in Africa. So this is a life-changing moment or experience I can call so. So myself I was an experimenterist but some years ago I met the Ali Hassanali and Professor Cuvedo the former director they came to Tanzania and Cuvedo said that they will support for my diploma and my PhD at ICTP and then so it was lucky that I came to ICTP to do both the diploma and the PhD. And then when I was there I found that our first president has been there and has been several meetings with Abdul Salam and so I found this quote from him and I found that I have something to give back to my people back in Africa in general. So I then started conducting and organizing biophysics schools in Africa so it started in 2018 and it has already trained more than 120 students including Fakati's from different countries and you can see to the right is the map of Africa in getting where the biophysics school has already reached or some of the participants that came from the countries. Since we started in 2018 at least two PhDs have already completed in the same field. We have three masters plus they have completed and others are ongoing. So ideally the idea started in 2017 when we were in an elevator me and my former PhD thesis advisor Ali Hassanali on the top right corner. Sorry so we saw that after finishing my piano I should do something in Tanzania and so then we organized the first school that we conducted at NMIS-T in Yarusha, Tanzania 2018 that we had 20-80 participants and then in the next year 2019 we also conducted of course we had two schools. So one of the schools in September and the other was during the big conference MRIs the African Material Research Society so we organized co-currentry and we had a total of 22 participants so in September we had 40 participants across the continent and then in 2020 we had another school so but this was a big challenge because of the outbreak of the COVID but we managed to do it with many of the professors now this time where all those talking from teaching from online. So before the COVID we used to bring many professors many scientists from ICTP and across the world to come in presence or in physical to give the talk but for the two years 2020 and 2021 mostly the talk were remotely except the few who were able to travel mostly from Africa. This year 2022 I had we have two schools while we conducted in January in Malawi was very exciting and the other one we have just finished here in Tanzania. So we started by introducing some very basic of drug design and focusing on molecular dynamics simulation as a tool that can help to design and develop drugs. As time goes on we started introducing other topics like machine learning, free energy and atomic simulations, molecular dynamics simulation for machine learning. So the idea is how we can use machine learning and atomic simulation to understand how the drug they work and find the drugs. So this some of the photos in history so the top one here was the first school and the second was when 2019 was very school with participants from many countries. Here again some success stories the top right corner here the lead she attended the last two schools and she was now she also assisted in doing some tutorials in Malawi in January and she was lucky now she's at ICTP at the moment she's doing a diploma in the contestant matter and statistical physics. The other lead also she's also in Italy at Milano but she work with another supervisor from Italy and at Eletra where she met her supervisors during the school and this one is he has already completed PhD and he managed to meet one of the ICTP Professor Nicola Selian and he visited ICTP to complement and finish his PhD studies. So some of the success is that we have that we have established this strong collaboration and there is such network including student supervision and other student has already mentioned. So the ICTP is up front years has already supported and is now continuing to support. Thanks to Katie for supporting. So the last two schools here we conducted in Malawi was really alive also changing experience because it was the first time to be done in Malawi and it was a kind of exposure to the students in Malawi and we agreed that to supervise at least one of the student who was interested and this one here at the bottom right corner now I'm supervising and the top is the two the last school by physics physics without frontier we conducted in Tanzania. So what do we plan now in the future is that we were planning to establish the African biophysics center of excellence where many of the faculty members and student then will be trained much appreciated to physics without frontiers and ICTP in general for the general support that has been providing us since the inception of the idea. Thank you very much. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. Okay do we have any questions for Daniel on this talk on biophysics and Daniel's journey? Hi Daniel it's Bobby here. Thank you for your presentation and all the efforts you're putting into this great program. So yeah I wanted to ask you about this center of excellence. Can you tell us more about your ideas as to how you will move towards that? Yes so the idea that we have we have done this now for five years but the idea is that we needed to have a focused place a place where scientists young scientists will come and to be trained and learn all this more in detail so we can also have some programs. So currently in Tanzania we don't have a curriculum or a program at the university to teach let's say biophysics or computational biophysics so the training that we have been doing they have been helping the students to do research and to get supervisors but we focus that if we can have a focus on this and have this excellence the center of excellence will help many of the young scientists in Africa to get solid training. I see. Thank you. Yeah you're welcome for more idea and suggestions about this how we should be. Talk about it also we should we should get Ali involved. Yes Ali and Eddie Gallonan are involved they they they know the idea of course I've already chatted with them but we can continue on chatting. Great thank you. Yes yeah yeah thank you. Brilliant thank you. Are there any other very quick comments or questions? Okay well thank you so much Daniel for this really nice talk and we look forward to seeing what you've got in mind for 2023 as well. Yeah for sure. Brilliant thank you thank you. Thank you thank you. Okay so moving on with our program we are now going to hear from Dr Irene Apoku near Tim about training in advanced statistics and programming in Ghana. Irene are you online hi here, hi Irene. Hello hi everyone good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you're coming from so I'm sharing my screen okay so I'm Irene Apoku in Tim from Ghana. I like to say a bit about Ghana so Ghana officially is a Republic of Ghana is a country in the West Africa and it's about the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south sharing borders with Ivory Coast to the west Burkina Faso in the north and Tobu to the east. So when it comes to STEM education in Ghana is an essential form of education which is needed to improve so take into consideration the era that we are in we all know that you are in the technological era and it's important for learners and teachers to understand the importance and relevance of STEM education and why we should embrace it. So in 2020 I applied for the visits with our frontiers and but due to the COVID it was postponed so I got the opportunity to apply again in 2021 and with the help of Cades we were able to put up a program which we organized this year in May from 2030 27th of May where we trained students across various fields but then we trained people in that graduate level because and the master's level and one of the reason why I chose the topic for the training advanced and programming in arrows the fact that I myself do a researcher also teaches at the University of Ghana. We have the School of Nuclear Analyzed Sciences why I teach research communication and scientific for advanced programming and I realized that the students like we just have a few students and when we also have little time to teach this course so we don't really we are not able to go through all the topics that the students are supposed to know so sometimes when it comes to their research proposal I realized that deluxe some skills so I decided to apply for the visits with our frontiers so that if I get I can also contact the school then we can organize training for a session of the students. So as I said the aim of the course was to offer an elaborate introduction to statistics and statistical programming in R where students will learn to operate our make plus fit assess and interpret a variety of basic statistical models. So we have this training we had a lot of volunteers who came on board my police because I told them we just had some small funding from ICT people's faces with our frontiers so I needed them to come on board for us to train the students so some of these volunteers we had Dr Morris Arthur with the nuclear power instead of the gun atomic energy we also have Dr Philip Dia Tenya we had Dr Joseph Berman Tando we had Dr Prisiana Udumahood we have Mr Frans Kwashi, Dr Tio Filos Adriaco and Dr Oredi Jampo and they all came together for us to organize this program so from the screen you can see a session of the students with the volunteer that's Dr Morris Arthur taking students through the programming course and all this because it shows a section of students and the volunteers interacting and I was excited the one that stood by saying he never knew like learning hours this easy I would have said earlier so I realized if this program had started earlier or we had organized them in previous years would have a lot of the students and some people didn't even know about the opportunities that ICT people has to offer so through this program we were able to educate them able to tell them all the opportunities that they can get through ICTP and they were really happy and I know from next year a lot of more people are going to apply for the Diploma courses and other opportunities that ICTP offers so what's where the impact on the students most students at the end realize look so fulfilled and happy to be part of the training course as I said the training in statistics in our school is not really they don't really get time to go through every aspect so this was really intense they got to understand it really well and it was practical I mean we had practical throughout from day one to the final day so they're really happy and Museswia et al but the program in which they had more days for the training but unfortunately it was just the one-week program and we promised them that we hope to make it an annual program so that a wider group of people also have the opportunity to join and as I said they asked volunteers to have another session and ask us that we make the program an annual one so you can see the photograph shows the first on my left shows are the director general of the Garnatomic Energy who also supported us and came out to support us on the final day gave out certificates to participants and the second picture shows our deputy director general of the Garnatomic Energy also came into support us and help us in giving out certificates to our students so what does a future hold for us so as I said you want to make this training an annual training program where we'll be collaborating with the ICTP, PWF, University of Ghana and the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission and we also hope to extend this program to a lot more people within the country because when we announced the program we had a lot of applicants across the country and because of accommodation and also for travel moves people were unable to join us so few people were able to come out from other regions to join because of accommodation so we want to make it so that if you get more funds we'll be able to extend to other people from other parts of the country thank you thank you Irene thank you that's a really wonderful talk you've done some really wonderful program okay well I can open the floor to a question I'll just check you can raise your hand on zoom if you'd like to ask maybe I can just ask while we're waiting I'm interested to know but so you taught these statistical techniques and our programming how did you work with the technical side did you have any trouble uploading or getting the students to accessed software or did you use say notebooks through a through a browser um how did you manage the technical side of things okay so with the technical side we had a very good technical team so um I think on the first day we before before the program we asked the students to install the R on their laptops before they come but those were not able to do that I think the first two hours we helped all of them to install so throughout our site that we didn't have any issues with students installing the R on their laptops because most people we asked them to install before they they get there and I think about 90% installed on their laptop before attending the program so the 10% what we said the program those who have not installed the technical team helped them to install it on their laptops perfect yeah and I guess that means they can also go on to practice more programming techniques after the course as well it's nice of it on the laptop you have any other questions for Irene Bobby it was it's bobby here it was interesting thank you for your presentation Irene by the way I think it's a really fantastic program um you mentioned that's you know some of the students didn't know about the diploma program so did I take it then that you did some advertising of it yes yes I did I think throughout the five days that we had a program at the end of every session we talked about the purchase that I am ICTP so um the diploma every program like that is available at ICTP we were able to let them know and more people realized oh they have these opportunities so um next year we are all going to apply to ICTP into one or two of their programs that's fantastic that's really great thank you and we look forward to continuing our partnership thank you yeah thanks Irene yes we should definitely talk soon thank you so much for your presentation joining us today appreciate it yeah yeah thank you okay so next we have um miss Abba Eli who's going to be talking to us about fostering physics in Nepal hi Abba hi hi Kate it's lovely to see you all here so I'm um going to share my screen can you see my slides yes thank you okay great so yes we've had a long partnership with ICTP and it's wonderful to be here talking about it I'm going to tell the framework of how we worked over the last decade so it's called taking high energy physics to higher altitudes because we work mostly in Nepal particularly in Kathmandu but some areas out of Kathmandu also from time to time so it all began when I met Kate after joining the Atlas experiments outreach and education group we had an idea of reaching out to different countries and the country that I knew best was Nepal because I was from there and so we wrote out to different universities and in 2013 me and Suyog we went to Nepal and we held a test test event to see if there was interest and how we could possibly go about it and when we returned to Geneva because we were working at CERN we created a framework that has held the test of time and we've used that framework for the past 10 years and all the events that we've held at Nepal so every time we go to go we organize events based on a three-pronged approach first we try to reach out to university physics students and then we try to reach out to high school science teachers and students and we always try to have a public component which is usually general public which is public facing and policy makers which are people who make decisions in the country so okay let me see so the first one which is university physics students we reach out to undergrads and grads so this was done in hell with a lot of help from the people on the ground especially through when university and company university I'd like to give out to Rajudai I think I saw him here if he's here Rajudai and Deepakthai they have been instrumental in helping us get students who are very interested in preparing them for the master classes these courses for the students the physics students were usually usually consisted of lectures which is the basic general overview of particle physics hands-on sessions where they could find particles they could discuss they were different kinds of hands-on sessions where they could actually interact with data from the LHC and then we had discussions and these discussions differed on what we felt that the students needed so we would often do a survey after or before the course and based on the survey that the students submitted we would say okay this year we should go with a career session because the students want to know more about what the opportunities they could pursue post their education outside or in Nepal the other possible discussions we've had is just a basic one about how to write applications for different summer schools or how to prepare the CVs how to submit to journals different discussion sessions based on things like that so the other component that we always used were high school students and science teachers we understood while we were working at CERN that there was a high school teachers training program and we wanted really to bring someone on board and this is what we did with the with the funding that we got from from ICTP was also try to have events in high schools in different parts of the country so we went to Nawa Ashok Rihon, Kathmandu, we went to Siangza's district and this particular event in Siangza was based after the first high school teacher had come to CERN trained, returned and we had a high school teachers training session in this village for 10 different schools and it was wonderful because it wasn't just high school we had like students from lower classes sneaking into the class because they thought we were having so much fun in there and then the other one the one in Sinduli in 2015 this one was supposed to be also for high schools but you know the whole village ended up because they were all so curious and they wanted to know and there's so many people in the classroom like it's dark as you can see and the other the third component that we always tried to include was facing the general public like who in the wider population could we reach out to and say hey we should be talking about science because eventually we will need your support so again these events varied based on what we thought now this we did not do surveys on but basically we thought what we could do what was within our reach and also what would fulfill a possible gap that existed so the first year we did a public outreach was the picture on the lower right which was a film screaming session of Particle Fever and then we had a discussion session and this was hugely popular we had almost 500 people on the waiting list people were showing up with blankets and mats to sit on the ground so they could just you know be inside and listen to the physicists because we had a panel discussion afterwards and then we went to Pokora just to this was more a goodwill building outreach session where physicists from CERN had gone to different parts of Nepal and had built you know children's homes or schools and things like that so we wanted to build goodwill there and also reach out to the students saying hey you know we care about you and we went to a home in Pokora with some merchandise from CERN and they just loved the Atlas 3D viewers on the left was a more I would say a landmark event where after having worked in a buffer three to five I think almost six to seven years doing these outreach events we realized that always we would have to ask okay where are the women where are the girls where are the female professors you know even if there was a female professor we often didn't see them involved in the in the organization or the process of creating the event on the ground so we to fill this gap we created a public event that was actually a whole day and one of the components was called Women in Science and we invited scientists female scientists in Nepal from different institutions and we just had a discussion which was hugely I would say energetic and very invigorating and there were I think a lot of awareness later about what possibly could be done so the third the third part second public facing event were outreach to policy makers so often we have policy makers in place in developing countries who do not necessarily know how to move forward in science though they are very interested and so what we need to do we figured is that we need to create partners within the government so they could then reach out to us when they needed expertise or when they needed some kind of advice or suggestions so we would go every time we went to Nepal for these outreach events we would have a meeting with either the in ministry of education or the ministry of science and then we would come back to CERN then we would go visit the embassy there and then build a rapport with the with the ambassador so every time there was a visiting dignitary in Switzerland then we would invite them to come and visit CERN and out of this effort which took many many years like eight to nine years we finally had Nepal sign a ICA which is the international cooperation agreement between CERN and the ministry of science and technology and in the picture here on the with Fabiola Gianotti who's the DG of CERN you see the ambassador of Nepal back then and he was very very supportive and very instrumental in helping us achieve what we later went on to achieve which is the the the president of Nepal came to visit CERN and she was very interested and invited the director of international affairs and various other scientists to Nepal and we also had their support and the support of Kathmandu University, Kathmandu, the support of Thruwin University and CERN seeing that how much effort we put in over the years asked us to organize the first South Asian high energy physics instrumentation workshop in Kathmandu and that's that's what we ended up doing in 2017 and it was I must say it's been an event that's continued and we were very proud to have started it so the next slide is because of the ICA and all the work we've done all the relationships we've built and all the interest we've heard from the people on the ground we realized that there was a gap in Nepal that could be filled with things that were existing at CERN but not necessarily being used which is the supercomputer so in CERN the supercomputers only use until they are you know they after a certain time they become obsolete for what CERN scientists do but these are perfectly capable very powerful supercomputers and they often donated to countries who want to use them and so Nepal was in this situation where they could not actually crunch their own data like they could not crunch their own data in a way that they would like so they would often send their data out to other countries so what we did was we worked with the government we worked with the universities we worked with the embassy in Geneva and we worked with the different departments inside CERN to make this happen and the supercomputers are currently housed in Kathmandu University and the team there have been instrumental in in training many many students like hundreds and hundreds of students and a lot of faculty and how to use this for yeah just different kinds of academic disciplines not just physics and they've gone on to publish many many papers and journals that are very prestigious and respected so the future becomes the present because when we started out we did not realize what what effect or impact we would have we only knew there were certain gaps that existed and we had the resources and the ability to fill those and I'm only putting some of the pictures here so on the left is Bishnu Lamsal who was the first high school teacher to attend the CERN science teacher training and he was the one who was instrumental and later going on and creating high school teachers events in the different schools in Xiangze and currently even when we go back to Nepal we meet up with him and eventually we get to talk to many many other high school teachers and we've also met the boards of different schools who are very interested it's just that now we realize we have a limit on the capacity and the bandwidth that we're able to operate in because there's so much interest. The second teacher is the one who came from Xiangze he was the principal of that sorry Sinduli he was the principal of that school and he came to CERN he got trained and he went back again similarly very instrumental very very energetic very enthusiastic has gone on to change the way science is taught in the schools today in the villages and on the right you will see a couple of students who were attending the outreach events the CERN summer schools that we organized for undergraduate and graduate students so on the left is Ishan he was the first one and he's currently a PhD student at Gottingen in Germany on the left on the right of Ishan you'll see Santosh who's currently also a PhD student at Southern Methodist University and below is Rami but besides them we had many like we had almost one or two students every year since we started outreach programs we had a teacher almost every year after we started this this yeah organ a way of organizing our events and on the right um Roshan Joshi who's currently a PhD student at Ohio State University he sent me this quote which I thought was very important because he said apart from learning about particle physics and research and making connections the events that we organized it helped me understand the importance of outreach programs and Roshan himself has gone on to organize many many outreach programs in in Nepal he organized one with Dear Walk which included theoretical components and we had virtual visits to CERN and we've always sort of had virtual visits to CERN but he was able to do a lot of things without with very little support from us so what is actually making me really happy is that all events that we've done now we can sort of give them to the younger people so they can continue it in their own capacities with their own perspectives in ways that we might not have been able to do and one of the out off shoots actually of the outreach programs was Milky Way Network which currently operates in Pokhara and they work more in astrophysics but they've been doing an amazing job also over the years so now I've taken a backseat from all the events I only offer advice and suggestions and there are a lot of other people who've put in proposals that are that have been picked by ICTP to fund and the current one is holographic Himalaya by CERN I think I saw him online also and this is a really interesting event and it's not something that would have fallen within the frameworks that we had created but it's very very important I think it is a long-term event it takes place online for six months and involves a lot of students and a lot of teachers to talk about the idea of quantum information aspects of spacetime and matter and on the right you will see in an event another proposal put in by another person who's been involved in quite a few of our outreach programs before but he was also a graduate student who attended CERN while studying at the University of Chicago and he's currently working with marginalized communities in Nepal in places that we actually had no reach to and he's there because he's from there and he's organizing a science outreach program for girls from these marginalized populations and give them the tools I mean not just organize an education event but give them the tools and help them understand how science works what are the opportunities that exist out there for them and how they could actually try to tap into the resources that are currently available online and through and have them interact with scientists too virtually I think these are all amazing efforts and I honestly could not have imagined that this would be the outcome and I'm really really happy to be here and thank you so much Bobby and Kate and ICTP and everyone who's supported and thank you to the people who are now putting in projects from Nepal I hope this enthusiasm and energy continues a lot lot longer. Thank you Aber. Thank you. Thank you Aber. Yes Nepal project has been going on I think for most of the 10 years of physics volunteers and it's been incredible what a lot of impact you've shown. We actually have a Nepalese student that's at our ICTP diploma program. Hello Aber. Hi. I think you remember me we met back in the 2018 when you were organizing the physics without funter program at Tribun University and now I'm doing I have been selected for the post graduate diploma program here at ICTP and I just want to thank you all for giving doing such hard work and I think I'm not wrong when I say that most of the student who have been part of the physics without funter program and got the opportunity to be in different universities and different places I'm telling thank you from all of them I think I'm not wrong when I say that and please continue your work and I'm very inspired by this work. Thank you. Thank you. This is what makes my day. Thank you so much. Yeah to actually have people come up and say yeah you know what you did this is what we're doing now because of yeah whatever you guys said you know and it's lovely congratulations so I'm making it to ICTP and it's just lovely to see young people come up and pursue an interest their interest in passion and science. Yeah it's fantastic any question or comment to Aber I just wanted to highlight actually what I really love about your programs is the focus that you do give towards policy making and outreach and I think that's something a lot of our other programs would like to look at doing a little bit more obviously the training and transferable skills and the mentoring of undergraduate students is really important I love that you take that time and I know that you probably need time to do that to do public events outreach events and access policy makers because you can see the impact that your programs had due to that work you've done so that's been great and thank you very much for that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your support Gade. I'll continue for so long I think you're the longest running partner of events. Yes and I wonder if Kieran is online today if he wanted to say a few words because his new project which just started is an online journal club for students in Nepal called Holographic Himalaya. Kieran do you want to say a couple words about that? It's so exciting I love it I want to join I barely understand the topics myself. Hi hello can you hear me? Yes okay so thank you so it was so nice listening to Eva talking about what she did in Nepal and I completely agree with you that we should also give some pressure to the policy makers in Nepal because they are the one who will at the end do something I mean they can make a bigger impact at the end and regarding our project like and this holographic Himalaya it supposed to be a online journal club and we have like around the 30 students and it will be so we will train them to how to do research and so and then these topics are like are now like very hot in theoretical physics so I mean yes it's interesting so personally it's interesting for me as well and I'm very excited. Yeah it looks like it's quantum information of space matter and time something like this yeah it looks fantastic and good luck with that and with your students Kieran and thank you very much to Aber for her talk thank you. So we will go we have just two talks left I can't believe it's going so fast. Our next talk is by Mr Moussin Al Jaf so he's at Garmanian University in the Kurdistan region in Iraq and we have a few different projects going on in the Kurdistan region in Iraq but Moussin will be talking his talk is called grasping at straws cosmology high energy physics and medical physics in the Kurdistan region in Iraq. Hi Moussin. Hi Kate can you hear me? Yes we can and can you see my screen? Yes it's sharing thank you. Okay perfect so first of all it's a really great pleasure to be here I'm very thankful to be invited. My name is Moussin I come from Kurdistan region of Iraq. I represent for many many volunteers and localizing Kurdistan region and I also want to before starting the talk I want to thank and appreciate the work all those who are beyond the scenes I mean the secretary staff in ICTP Professor Bob and Kate Show all those who have participated in this project that initiate this project I believe there's something really bigger than thinking about oneself but caring about others so I really appreciate that and this is really needed to be appreciated so and all of course all those who are doing these projects in different regions in the world because I see that we are having a lot of project from different regions and this is what brings back to the title of my talk grasping at straws because I believe PWF and the original mission of ICTP has been like a like grasping at straw which means trying to find a way where other things doesn't work in order to succeed I think in at least in my case in Kurdistan region these projects and this initiative was something like that for us so let me just introduce the the my region I could Iraqi Kurdistan or Kurdistan region is an autonomous region in the north of Iraq it's there are three provinces main provinces to Hawke, Soleimania and Erbil these are the picture of the cities and there are like academically there are 12 private universities and 15 public university this is a map to Hawke, Soleimania and Erbil so let me come to the sorry okay let me come to the motivation what I mean the motivation is comes from the need basically on my observation all the friends I have and all those who are aware of the scientific situation in this region we see a lot of physics in the west is the students who don't have any venue to pursue their degree in fundamental physics we focus on fundamental physics because we see other fields like applied physics and material science there are research quite research about that and there is graduate degrees and programs but for the fundamental physics like cosmology and particle physics unfortunately the education and stops after bachelor degree there is no programs there is no experts and that's what we really lack of in this region we don't have experts in order to have programs and finally students and experts again so in back in 2017 I was emailing Stephen Weinberg and I was asking for advice like I like these fields but what to do what kind of what kind of advice can you give me and he was actually confirming the same problem he was saying that in these regions the government in these countries they don't support for fundamental physics and they only care about the the fields that has immediate application so you either better to work on theory either abroad or just inside and so that's where I start to go abroad and finally I find some position in China I was lucky and the beginning of this story was ICTP was starting from Xinhua University when I was participating in a conference I met Nima Arkani and I was somehow I mean complaining like it's difficult for the student from my region at least to to get to the top universities and he was immediately said try ICTP by the time I knew that there is something like ICTP but I didn't know the mission the goal the outreach call especially so I applied and I actually I was admitted to this summer school back in 2019 and then I met Paktash who and we had a small chat he was talking about PWF and it was really fascinating to me so I immediately went to the director professor Fernando the former director and actually he was really nice to me and he talked about the program I like the idea and he said I remember quite well he said we will food quarter sandwiching our priority and he said email Kate so that's where I found Kate and email him he was not she was not there at the time but we had emails and then we started thinking about the project the first project was in 2019 we had few months to prepare but collecting the speaker was very difficult at the beginning I found one of my colleagues in China and also Daniel Grigoris who was an Italian physicist there and there was in total three speakers around 60 students participated and these are the pictures we had at last I mean session live from the LSE and actually it was really really I mean I saw many many motivated student there they were really excited by the seeing the real sciences talking about the real science and we gave basic lectures about the cosmology and particle physics and of course we couldn't come I mean and say they discover all the topics but the idea is to just motivate and show them that it can be done and if they want to pursue this the direction this is a team two of these people this two young students now they are pursuing their master degree in China and her cascade meeting with a faculty member the second project was back in 2020 September this time we had a lot of time to prepare luckily we got some funding also from the University of Garmia I mean Salahadin that's the university in capital city we had a lot of good international speakers because we had time to prepare and invite them including Sean Carroll from Caltech and Lavina Heisenberg from ETH Zurich we had master classes in these events we had 30 lectures on the basics of cosmology inflation particle physics phenology this is a team actually for this event as I said we were really prepared we had a lot of volunteers to help us so that was really nice for us and this year in February we had a workshop for the students of German University it was about the LHC and the importance of LHC and how physicists find particles in LHC we had three I mean two local liens and including myself which is the third we had a session from Sen and also two lecture about the basics of LHC and particle physics this event which I mean this is the last event I'm talking about which is happening right now in thermal university it's not in the fundamental physics but it's in medical physics there are three international speakers from Italy also in partnership with some Italian hospital you see that the team has arrived and we have a lot of participants from the university because students from this university they are medical physics students so the program really fits their curriculum and about the impact I just want to be quick because I think they don't have so much time we I mean the idea was not to teach all the details to the students but to to show them the cutting edge of science and motivate them to find their direction in fundamental physics and also we brought those people those students who shared the same dream who like to pursue their degrees or studies in fundamental physics of course we have now right now a lot of liens and volunteers in different universities that will help us to organise more events actually for example in this last event I was not participating anything because now the project it's one is food and we have different volunteers in different universities so I think that's a more important thing because it's like a chain reaction starting from one person or two person originally from ICTP and now we have a lot of volunteers in different universities also we create an online group for support those who want to see career and study abroad by guiding them through the application process and giving providing them with opportunities these are some course from the students for example I know Shirvan Mustafa who which he was one of the participants he said I'm studying master degree in cosmology and gravity right now Daban said that the school gave me hope and dreams of becoming a real scientist and Rejnaher which she was one of the female parts and she said that it was a scientific joy that in many years of universities studies I've been experienced so because most of them in these universities it's just about textbooks and classical lectures to see real science and real scientist it's difficult here so the last word I want to say that about the future plans and what we really need right now as I said we need to put the project on its foot so meaning that we should have more volunteers and I mean speakers in different universities so that they can do it by themselves and also we want to organize more events in not just in high energy physics and cosmology but in other science feels like what we did recently in medical physics my last home is to do some projects in Rojava which is a Kurdish part of northern Syria this region are really in war and in conflict right now some some terrible bombing happening by Turkey and I know some universities there that their students they don't have the same privileged students that are in Kurdistan region so I find contact I will try to we will try that it's more than me we will try to find some ways to help them by doing some projects thank you so much I'm sorry I think I passed the time no thank you so much Moussin really incredible amount of work you guys have done in various different universities and yeah at the moment we have the medical physics school going on at this moment which is really exciting okay so do we have any questions from zoom or from the room okay bobby yeah um I hope the medical physics school is going well um do you think this is something that may be repeated in the future or in some form uh are you mean the regarding the medical school yeah well I think now we have uh volunteers and people who can write and apply for this project we have only one program in Kurdistan region who provides undergraduate medical physics and that's in this university so I think in the future now they have a network in Italy from I mean speakers if you have the speakers then organizing this school will be easy so I think they these volunteers that I know they they will repeat this courses maybe long courses because as far as I know even the title of the program is medical physics but they don't have so much courses special courses in this field it's basically the same physics but this is really different that we have done for them yeah I think it's amazing I mean overall it's amazing what you're you and your colleagues are doing thank you thank you so much for you too thank you and I was going to ask missin yeah we started to talk to universities in Rajava I wonder if you've managed to make contact with them again and if we've got some ideas for the next steps well I have some people there I mean from Rajava universities and Kobani university but what we really I mean a stress of all the region is not stable sometimes bombing happens wars happen threats happens but I think that the first problem that we are facing is the language barrier the students cannot they study either in Kurdish or Arabic so we need some people who can speak Arabic and do physics recently we did some help without I mean the context of ic tv there was a students master students students who who needed some supervisor we find some supervisor for him but there is always some restrict requirement and also included policy I mean politics it's kind of a sentence of these regions so the people who help should be also careful but we will try I mean I am in contact with them and we will try to find some ways they need a lot I mean they are much more in need than the people I mean this university there the university is not recognized by the central government of course that makes things doubly complicated okay thank you so much missin you're doing fantastic work and so much thanks so much for joining and sharing with us appreciate it thank you so much okay we are on to our last talk of the day so this is from Dr Arturi Sanchez he was a ex a postdoc here at ic tv and he's going to be talking to us about pursuing physics and opportunities in venezuela so we do several activities quite different things and Arturi has kind of agreed to summarise quite a lot of that for us. Hi Arturi. Hi. Can you hear me? Yes yes excellent first nice to see you again guys congratulations I hope that we can continue doing many of these projects just a few seconds again yes I was there at CTP and I just can be a little bit selfish right now and tell you that all these projects also have been really really amazing to do it a lot of fun obviously interact with the students it's always quite refreshing and you learn a lot so I saw all the different projects during the three four hours that you have been here and all have the same mission obviously similar way what I will present to you here about Venezuela right now I spoke also a couple of hours before me about the son of this effort so this is a companion of the other project let's say so I will start with son of this one of the more recent in fact this was this year at the beginning of this year we did a summer school or summer school sorry a physicist school it's called brain game and I will come back about this brain game during the presentation but the scope of this school was essentially invite different universities in Venezuela and anybody else essentially in Latino America as again were mentioned by Reina in several of the projects that wanted to to join to these two weeks school where we also give some support things to the ICTP and the physics we are from tear program to some a student to to have resources for example to get some internet connection to most of the students are connecting from their own home these have been also as many of the project that you already show a common after the pandemic and and even before in some cases in Venezuela due to to the particular situation of the country but anyway it was a very very nice event we managed a lot of at this point again since I am talking about a very recent event with respect to all the others we were better and better in how to call the attention of the student and how to propagate this information through social media to you know to let the people know what was the casual the person that we were talking what was about being sure that he was in in the hour for the different country that were participated most of the the instructors where people in also in Venezuela professors in Venezuela with some help for us I have to mention for example right now I'm talking from Switzerland most of the the the people that we will mention here as the organizer of events are outside the country as many of you may be in in your cases but all the focus have been in engage not only the students but also the professionals in the different universities and this is why you used to see a lot of logos here in in all this presentation so it was a very nice event was very successful we managed to engage these people again for two weeks something that is quite difficult sometimes especially because obviously the people needed especially the student has to be there they needed to make a minimum about of these different courses of these different subjects in order to also get the certificate of the participation in the in the in the school so we without going to the details we have participants for the main universities of the country but we also make a big effort to call students from the smaller university or the university we didn't reach yet during all the different programs that we have done during the past year so it was quite balanced also in terms of numbers of females and males and in in something that is quite positive obviously all the time but I must say also a nice feature of region for for example in Venezuela in general in Latin America so it's nice to to see that another project I wanted to bring to this meeting was is the physics reboot Venezuela so it was mentioned also in the presentation by Reina that Sonos we have been doing this since several years already I lost the count maybe six seven years already even more with Seval if you include it and some of these students at that time they grow they they are very good they become professional masters to them PhD now and doing research and some of this project now are managed by these people so it's really also cool to see how the evolution of these people obviously in in 99.9% of their own effort of their own capacity but also with this interaction that we have a thesis with a frontier and this is one of the example here and reboot is a program made or running by most of students from the university university of Mont Bolivar in Venezuela but as you can see the all these different logos means all the different people that they invite also the different institution where the different young people now is studying or even now even doing research so some of these phases are very familiar for for us because there are people who have been with us in different programs through Sevalet to Physics with a frontier during this year so this is also quite a nice program because they try to enlarge the amount of subjects that are teaching these different programs so for example they're talking about computational science something that we also do but quite important soft skills so how to write a good curriculum is about the the management of the time the management of the stress and these kinds of skills that are also quite important in order to have a successful career but all going all the way to quantum information, quantum technology and obviously the networking that is a common thing in all the different programs so try to connect the students with all the students with teachers, with professors, with opportunities that the different programs that we you have mentioned that that is happening during the physical sorry NICTP at turn and many other facilities around the world so again they have these multiple programs where participants as you can see the program is mainly online they have a guest lecture so people who is expert in a particular area that give you some lectures and again not only in hard science quantum computing but also in some other capacity and other tips and tools and obviously the networking that is quite important essentially for for for the students in order to continue their their studies and their careers. Another nice project and also that was mentioned before in in Reina's presentation so not to repeat too much here but that Daniel Daniel and together with other people again from in this case for University of Los Andes that is also my our alma mater for all those of us here it started to run also online and very successfully also inviting people expert in the area to go for what is what we call advanced lecture in theoretical physics so the subjects go again all the way for quantum field theory computational touring high in the physics but also quantum gravity extreme theory so really a very large amount of of of expertise has to be brought in this very nice project for for Daniel and their colleagues in order to show and to engage the students with subjects that we didn't touch in other physical physical frontier program essentially because we don't have this kind of expertise and so having very cool to see how others have been expanding the same effort with more or less the same mechanism you see this only online events this kind of the school this engagement this there is a lot of effort put also in the social media in order to call the attention of the people to call the attention of the students and the the the the researchers that will talk with us so I mentioned before that this this brain game was part of the the organizer of the school but there is a particular program that we created thanks again to physical frontiers and the ICTP in general to in order to also support the professors in the universities in Venezuela public universities in Venezuela so in 2019 we run a call in this case to help professor that have been and still are there on the ground on the universities teaching all the different courses even after all the different difficulties on the country so without going the details all the different countries have been participating here the conditions are not always optimal to to to teach for to say in a in a nice way so this program was focused mainly in the professors and was really interesting to see also the how this bring together the the the application of professor to show what they are doing in the country to show what they would like to continue doing it in the different classes and and different even extra things like you know most of them also have a student doing some different thesis for example so we run the program a couple of times we these are for example the first four fellows of the physics with a physics with a frontier brain game program in Venezuela um two of them for from ula one for the university of Asimov Bolivar and one for the university as central the Venezuela and um we run the program again this the year after it was more um we decided to try to um the split that resources into more uh professor into more teacher assistant that uh these applications so these are the second group of fellows that uh were awarded for this um brain game so there's a um this fellowship you can call it like this and we're together with them and thanks to them that we organize that school that I presented at the very beginning so having always this connection of let's keep um helping the people that is still doing the oldest huge effort in the country and also obviously getting involved in all the different programs so one of these is the the school dimension that was quite successful in a big part because they were the the not all but a big portion of the lecturers during that school so more or less another program that was very nice and very uh nice project and small project but quite uh um value for us we make a small master thesis project with with Physic with a Frontier also where we we were running different um essentially we have different master students during uh during those years and we proposed um physical with a frontier if they can essentially be uh put in a single umbrella and a small project so they can show to the program to ICTP uh what they have done during their thesis so we we have a little workshop with some of these students so I'm presenting in English some of them presenting Hispanics and saying for that because one of the main reasons why I'm doing all this is also that they have this exposure this opportunity to explain what they are doing and and you know and to have this feeling or make a presentation that is obviously quite relevant for what we do in and um and I want to finish with a very last project that we run this story before that um these are the presentations of the defense the thesis defense of a couple of students in the previous program so one of the mission that we wanted to accomplish here with all the people that we prepare in this slide is to try to give you an idea of the different the continuity of all the different projects and how we try to continue mentoring continue tracking the student and how those students became in fact now teachers now lecturers now the organizer of new projects and I wanted just to finish with a very last project in this case we use some of these different classes especially about computing that analysis programming and we run also a very nice program in Honduras it's part of the the region of the world that we wanted to touch with um we physically are from tears of the Central America part um and we have a lot of success here also um it's it's a little bit different because most of the students are no physics students they are engineers students so we had it to adapt all the material to uh to what they really want what they see most let's say what can be more practical in their uh careers so this is my very bad last example of how we have been trying to expand not only the program but also how we can reuse this material that we know is useful in other areas and try to expand also the target audience that we would like to reach and this is yes my last slide thank you so much again sorry Kay as usual I tell you one two minutes Bobby but I have been a pleasure every second thank you thank you Arturi yes you had covered quite a lot of different projects um from various things we've been doing in Venezuela over the years okay any questions yes thank you okay okay hi good afternoon hi well first of all congratulations for your projects your presentation alone so thank you for your leadership I recognize that physics without frontiers should also be physics without borders and I live in Cartagena Colombia and recently our two countries opened the borders after six years of having closed them and I was wondering what are you what are your comments about this new opportunity or going forward what do you think can be done between the two countries since we are also Caribbean countries but it's it's a sorry your name I didn't hear your names oh sorry my name is Javier Montoya I work at the University of Cartagena score I'm Montoya yes Javier no um I mean it's really nice that you bring the the the the subject of Colombia and Venezuela because I was I mean I can't give you a random number by the very big portion of many of these programs have been in collaboration with you guys so Colombia have been instrumental in many of these things in many cases without annoying but in a positive way for example I am from the tachyra and just to give you a put a context to the rest of the people here is one of the states in the border that Javier was just mentioned right now and um and um so every time especially for example when we go to this we went to these round trips I was the person who used to go to Venezuela and the only way I the easiest way to go was to walk that border there wasn't close during all the years that we did that program so and it's still you need to walk there is no only way to pass that so in a positive way because this is the last presentation but in a realistic way we have been working even with that difficulties so I think that even boosts a little bit more this kind of programs many of our professors students are studying and living in Colombia and they have been so the cooperation have been wonderful we will work like um that border didn't exist and um and we hope that we will continue doing like this so hopefully it will be easier the movement of people will be easier but um uh we have been a very good partnership and thank you for that in your country thank you very much and what about organizing one of these next events perhaps on the other side of the border would you come absolutely I mean I am a little bit farther but then we can make it and uh there it's always a pleasure to be there and it's a good excuse to to be sick for rombia and to be a friend of you bye thank you okay any last comments questions okay thank you Arturo um that was a fantastic talk and thank you for covering also the boot camps and all the exciting things people have been organizing in Venezuela so this is the end of the session thank you so much for staying and listening to all these talks I hope you find them as inspirational and fascinating as I have Bobby is that all you wanted to say Kate told you have some last remarks now I just wanted to say for those of you that are still here first of all thank you to everyone for their excellent but putting so much effort into making these presentations but uh you know to see um to get this overview after 10 years um it's really amazing what people can achieve when they have these goals in mind and I just I want to thank everyone um that was uh has contributed um to all of these wonderful projects that have had so much uh impact um in inspiring and giving opportunities to young budding scientists so it's just wonderful and especially thanks to Kate for dedicating so much time over the last 10 years getting these projects up and running so let's have a some applause for Kate please thank you Bobby and thanks to me and I'm sorry we couldn't cover all the wonderful projects that we do there's so many more so you do have a look at our website and you can see the huge number of projects and wonderful activities we do all over the world and if you're interested in doing something or want to get in contact you can email us pwf at ictp.it and you can follow us on the social media at ictp pwf okay thank you so much please everyone stay in touch with us email us and we will catch up with everybody and thank you everybody in the room and we'll sign off and say goodbye thanks everybody you can say bye bye bye bye