 I'm sorry. Hi, hi, good afternoon everybody and welcome to Physics Out Frontiers annual meeting. It's our pleasure to welcome you all here at ICTP and welcome everybody on Zoom. So needless to say please do on Zoom keep your microphones off and if you'd like to ask a question you may put your hand up and you may speak but keep your microphones off at all other times. And do use the chat if you have any questions or you'd like to discuss things during our meeting. So just to remind everyone to keep their videos and the chat off. So let's start today with an introduction to Physics Out Frontiers by Bobby Acharya. Fantastic. Welcome everyone. So it's been a wonderful bit into our eleventh year now. So the purpose of this of today is partly to just recap and not just to summarise what we've been doing but to kind of get people together. I mean it's mostly, you know, mostly most of the participants are online to see so that everyone can see what other groups have been doing, et cetera and for us to have a nice conversation about how we go forwards. So I'm going to begin with just like a brief, very brief introduction to the programme. Archyweiser, the slides, oh maybe, sorry, yes, excuse me. So Physics Without Frontiers, what is this here, excuse me. Physics Without Frontiers, as many of you know, but for those that don't, is an ICTP programme that aims to inspire and reach undergraduates and beginning researchers in physics and mathematics all over the world. We do, as you'll see from today's kind of snapshot into the year's activities, we do a whole host of different types of projects and each one is, you know, tailor made to various requirements, let's say, and needs. The aims of the programme are to expose and introduce new ideas in physics as I mentioned to undergraduate and master's students. We provide courses, we can provide training in specific skills and also transferable skills. As the presentations later see that the mentoring, even though we don't have a formal mentoring programme, mentoring is a kind of natural consequence of what we do and that provides stimulation and support for participants in our various programmes to go on to further study and career prospects. Networking is a huge element of it as well. The kind of people that are involved in the projects provide, I mean naturally provide opportunities for networking and connections and at an even higher level the activities highlight the importance of physics and mathematics in particular areas to the government and university administrators. It's primarily based on volunteers, so, you know, more than 90, you know, essentially everyone that works on physics without frontiers projects is a volunteer and our volunteers are really the core. Without our volunteers we wouldn't be able to function at all. As you'll see from the later presentations there's a whole host of different types of activities which roughly can be categorised into these boxes but not necessarily. Frontiers doesn't necessarily mean physical or geographical frontiers. Frontiers, the name of the programme, really is about reaching underrepresented groups and that could be economic, social, geographic or socio-political. And we're always, always open to expand our horizons to new frontiers. This is a list of the countries where we're currently working and where we've done projects in the past, roughly 50 or so, just over 50 countries, but we're continuing to expand and actually like to engage with as many countries as possible. Yeah, this is just my snapshot of some of the things we've been doing in the past years and we have now a mailing list which you can subscribe to and various social media accounts where you can follow what we're doing but the main way to keep up with what we're doing is this mailing list. So the rest of today's, so after this presentation or this introduction we can now go on to the main programme, Kate. I'm going to hand it back to Kate to move on to the first presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you, Bobby. Can we thank the speaker? Do we have any quick questions from anybody in the room or on Zoom? Thank you. I just would like to find out how is the coordination done in the various countries. I saw my country in the Ghana. I've heard of physics without frontiers, but so who coordinates the activity? If you want to maybe engage in a project or... The question was how are different countries coordinated? The question was from a participant from Ghana where we've done projects in the past. So what tends to happen but that's not necessarily an official policy of the programme is simply, you know, if we... So in the spring we have a call for ideas and proposals for projects. So then people will apply and then we work for proposals that we think have promise. We work with the proposers to shape it into a concrete proposal and then if it's accepted it becomes an actual project. And what tends to happen is that it's a sort of first come, first serve thing. So let's say Ghana was not on this list and then you or one of your colleagues submitted a proposal that looked interesting and so on, then the chief of that proposal would end up effectively becoming the PWF representative in that country. But it's not a formal title or anything. And in some countries we do more than one project per year actually. For example, Nepal, Philippines, we've done... And some other countries we actually have several projects running at the same time. Or I mean in one kind of calendar year. So anyway if you're interested in proposing something we'll be having a call which will probably open in February for a month or two. But if you want to discuss it with us please let's have a chat about it. Sorry. Okay, I thought we were going to do this at the end but we'll do it now. Before we actually get into the programme, the main body of the programme, I want to introduce the rest of our team. Kate, you've met already who introduced the meeting. Natasha is a new member of the team that runs projects. Say hello, Natasha. And then Margarita, who's sitting here, is our administrator. Or actually she was our administrator. Now she's actually moving on. And we're in the process of finding someone to fill her boots. Not easy, but... So before you move on Margarita, I actually wanted to give you a little parting gift from your fellow team members. And wish you all the best. Thank you, thank you very much Bobby. We wouldn't have been able to do anything at all without the amazing help of Margarita over the years. And I know everybody online that has worked with us and where Margarita also sends her thanks and appreciation. Thank you so much Bobby. We will move on to the next talk, which is Cuda, who will be talking... Oops, from the Zimbabwe project. Cuda, do you hear us? Can you share your screen? Perfect. And we can see you. We can see you. Please go ahead. Okay, good afternoon everyone. My full name is Cuda Kwashi Jakata. And we did the Physics Without Frontiers project in Zimbabwe. And the title of our project was Synchrotron Physics and X-ray imaging techniques. It was a road show from the 18th to the 27th of October. So this was last month. We were supported by quite a lot of organisations as you can see on our poster here. Of course, we were very thankful to Kate for assisting us with creating the poster. So the motivation for doing this project, this road show, it was that we wanted to go and inform undergraduate and postgraduate students in Zimbabwe on X-ray synchrotrons and their scientific applications. The idea behind this is that Africa is the only continent at the moment that does not have a synchrotron or an advanced light source. And a lot of people in Zimbabwe are not even aware of what a light source is or what an X-ray synchrotron is. And so that was a big part of it. And then also, the idea was that after having gone around doing a road show at five universities where we would have given a lot of lectures, then I had already put in a bid to host the African Light Source Conference, which is one of the organisations that is trying to get a synchrotron, the first synchrotron on the African continent. So we thought that after this, we planned to see that next year we host the African Light Source Conference in Zimbabwe where we would then bring in a lot of experts, beam line scientists and people who have worked the synchrotrons for many years and they give presentations and then you get a lot of interaction between now the Zimbabwe scientific community and these undergraduate and postgraduate students with the experts in the field. And what this was going to do is that it was going to lead to discussions with senior university personnel. And also because if we then host the conference, then the government definitely is going to be involved. And so the message gets across to the government so that they then can probably also start supporting projects that have a leaning towards the use of advanced light sources. So this was the idea. So the team of people who went to do the project were speakers during this road show. We have here in blue, this is Gideon Chinamantira. So Gideon is a PhD student working on a project in x-ray computer tomography. And he also has some synchrotron experience. He went to the ESRF for two months to be trained to do experiments in tomography at a synchrotron light facility, which was also funded I think via the ICTP. And he has also been given a job as the city lab manager, which he will probably start soon as his work permit is ready. And then we had Hilary, Hilary Masenda. So he is a lecturer at the University of Witwater's Rand, and he does research and experiments at Isolda Sen where he makes use of a proton synchrotron where they produce radioisotopes for studying material science. And then myself, I'm a senior support scientist at the Diamond Light Source where I do my support experiments on tachography and break coherent diffraction imaging. So we had a very interesting trip. I had to fly from the United Kingdom where I worked to Johannesburg and then we hired a car and we drove from South Africa, from Johannesburg across the border into Zimbabwe, first to Harare, where we were the first two days of lectures. The first day was at the Harare Institute of Technology and then the second day was at the University of Zimbabwe. So for the first day, how we structured this was then when first we go to the venue, the day before we see what the venue looks like, we make sure everything is well arranged, we meet the people, so that's on the day of the seminars or lectures, we know exactly where to go and who to contact if anything is wrong. And then on the next day we would then have the lectures. And so that's what we did at all the places. So in Harare, we went to the Harare Institute of Technology, then to the University of Zimbabwe. Then after that we drove down to Chenoy, where we went to the Chenoy University of Technology. And after that we drove down to the Midlands province, where there is the Midlands State University. We spent another day there having lectures. Then finally we drove to Matabelle Land to the National University of Science and Technology. And then after this we then drove back to South Africa. So of course putting a few pictures here along the way, we tried to have a bit of fun because it was a very long and strange drive. Fortunately we were exchanging driving even though we only have pictures of Gidion driving here. But yeah, we tried to buy some local fruits which were very, very tasty. We called them Majange in Zimbabwe. By the way, the three speakers are all Zimbabwe. So they're called Majange in Zimbabwe. I don't know what they're called in any other country. This is the staple foods that we're eating most of the time in Zimbabwe. It's called Salsa in Zimbabwe. Papin South Africa, I don't know if what it may be called in other places. At the Chenoy University, one of the hosts gave us a lot of sugar cane, which we really enjoyed on our way. So we drove a total distance of about 3,200 kilometres. So there were some challenges in this. Sorry, I hope you guys could hear me clearly. My mic was not in the right place. So there were some challenges. There were some electricity cut-offs at some of the venues and the programme was cut short at two of the institutions. And one of the other challenges, which are research challenges because after delivering the lectures and now having discussions with some of the academics at the institutions, I think what really came out was that there is limited research equipment which can be used for the research that can lead up to the use of the need or the need for an advanced light source or a synchrotron light source. And also there is a limited funding for master's positions in the country because the idea was that if master students can then study for synchrotron-related projects, perhaps they would then stand a good chance of getting PhD positions outside the country at the current synchrotron light sources. But however, there were also some very big positives and the lectures, they were well attended. We had over 350 participants that were registered to attend in total at all the five institutions, which was a very high number in my view. And at most of these institutions, actually at all of them, we had meetings with senior institution personnel like vice-chancellars, pro-vice-chancellars or the registrars, the decision makers and we discussed with them about the African light source and the synchrotrons and the research at synchrotrons and they understood what we're talking about and I must say in all cases the response was we need to get the ministers and the government to know immediately so that we can be involved in this. So this was, we were very happy to hear this response and also they were all very keen to host the African light source conference at their institutions, which made it a little bit more complicated because we were wondering if our bid is accepted, then where exactly is it going to end up being hosted. And there were requests for a follow-up school or seminar or to form a group that will work on a synchrotron-related project. So these are things that we have already started following up on and trying to do something about. So here are some pictures of some of the, at the various venues. So here this is at the very first day of lectures at the Harare Institute of Technology. As you can see it was quite well attended. Then from there we went to the University of Zimbabwe, see quite a lot of people there. Then at the Chino University of Technology where we did, this was our third day and from there we went to the Midlands State University and finally at the National University of Science and Technology. So some of the comments from the participants, I think one person said it was a mentally stimulating day of seminars. Another person at a different institute said the lecture on synchrotrons and I saw them saying, he says what he or she thought was impossible seems now to be possible. One person was asking if it can be an annual event. Person was I'll say it was very impressive initiative showed. Can we do it more often? So these are some of the responses of views from the participants. So as we were going around of course, we were very active on social media using LinkedIn, using Facebook and on X to all formally Twitter. So here is a post from day one from the Harare Institute of Technology. You can see that there were quite a lot of views and comments. This was a post also put in by the ICTP, PWF. I think I can't remember whether it was on Twitter or on Instagram. And here this was on LinkedIn from my institution, the Diamond Light Source. They also put up something on their LinkedIn page about our event. Additionally, when we were at the Midlands State University, they had a journalist there who did a story on the event. So they eventually wrote an article on their webpage, X revisions, experts gather at the Midlands State University for discussion on cutting edge imaging resources, imaging techniques. Additionally, we also put in some social media posts on several platforms as well. So you can see here in this picture, this is the Pro-Vice Chancellor. We also had a meeting with her. We had a meeting with the Vice Chancellor at the Midlands State University. And this is the Dean of the Faculty of Science. They both attended the whole days of lecture. And they were very, very positive about the project and they asked if we could come back as well. So the outcomes, I think we were quite impressed by the whole sort of projects and we were very happy about the whole, I think the response from everyone. And I think from this, we identified two students for a possible PhD that we would like to take on board. That would probably co-supervise the student, Hillary and I. And we also, at one of the institutions, they had two samples for a research project which we discussed in detail and which I took with me so that we can actually start working on some synchrotron-related projects, which is actually quite fantastic because I think we are hoping that maybe in a year or so there will be at least the first publication from a researcher based in Zimbabwe, probably with a student on synchrotron-related work. Then there were quite a number of students who were interested in pursuing masters related, related to advanced light sources. So one of the lecturers at the University of Zimbabwe said they might be able to find funding for a few of the students so were waiting for that process to go ahead. And then also there were a number of collaborative projects that we discussed which we will try to undertake with them. We should be synchrotron-related or advanced light source-related projects. So I think that's almost everything. Just to mention that as far as hosting the African Light Source Conference in Zimbabwe in 2024, the meeting to decide whether this will happen or not is actually we're going to have that meeting today at six o'clock with the executive members of the African Light Source. I'll probably know today. So thank you very much. I would like to particularly thank Kate and Natasha for all the assistance in the whole project because without the assistance I think it would have been really, really tough. And also I leave you here with a picture of the full team so I had shown you the three speakers but we also had someone who was assisting us who volunteered to assist us at Chidomanjokwta who was a physics student at the University of Zimbabwe. She was doing a lot of the administrative work. Thank you very much. Thank you, Cuda. Any questions or? We have time for a question. Any questions for Cuda? There's Andrea Banffi. There's a hand up, yes. Oh hi Andrea, yes please go ahead. Thanks a lot for this brilliant talk. So I'm a colleague of Kate Shaw. I work in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. So given that this research has practical applications I'm wondering and the difficulty and finding for MSc students is widespread. I was wondering whether there could be private companies that could be interested in such research being developed and then feed in the funding to support MSc students. I wonder whether you have investigated these opportunities? So thank you very much for your question. It's a very good question. There is one, the host at the Chino University of Technology. So he has managed, he has contacts with a certain mining company in Zimbabwe and he's actually working with them on a project where we could eventually do some imaging at a synchrotron and they use that for an analysis that would be beneficial to them. He's the one who's going to look for the funding for this. If it's successful, which it looks like it might be successful, then it will work. The only thing is, I don't think we'll be able to get funding for 10 students. We will probably get something for maybe two or three, but I think that's a start. Thank you, Andrea. Thank you again, Cuda, for that fantastic talk and to you and your whole team for a really amazing project. Well done. Thank you. I'll stop sharing. So we will go on to our next talk which is from Daniel Galvez who's going to tell us about his work in Latin America. Go ahead, Daniel. Thank you, Kate. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Hi, everyone. Thank you for this invitation and for giving this space to the physics lab. Okay. So what is physics Latin? It's a non-profit project funded in 2002 with the support of ICTP Physics with a frontier and the other project here today aimed at promoting education and research theoretical physics and mathematics in Latin America. It provides online advanced lectures, workshop seminars and online resources to students and researchers facing socio-economical barriers to accessing quality education. The project aims to build a strong and diverse network of physicists and mathematicians in Latin America who can make meaningful contributions to the advancement of science or what this is what is intended. Okay. So an overview. So we offer online courses in advanced theoretical physics, mostly, but also in math. We also arrange seminars with international professors and our target public. It's mainly Latin American students at undergrad and grad level. So this is how it looks. Our first year we start with quantum field theory. Then we went with geometry and topology in physics and quantum gravity. Over the summer we have general relativity and cosmology and algebraic geometry. And recently we have again quantum field theory and theoretical particle physics. So participation. We have reached over 300 students all across Latin America. But we also have students from other countries like India and China. Seminars are led by professors from universities in Europe, United States, China, India, Australia and West America. We strive for gender balance in our activities. To keep this always the same. Our activities are all conducted online and the seminars are available in Spanish or in English. This is how our Google classroom looks like when we have the courses in theoretical particle physics, GFT, algebraic geometry and GI. So far for this year we have three lectures, nine teaching assistants and three project assistants, which are mainly PhD students, mostly from Latin America, but they are studying all around the world. So we have students in Italy, students in Germany, in the United States, in Canada, in CISA and Stony Brook and so on. So our team strives to attend international schools and conferences. So we can integrate the knowledge learned into our lectures. So for example, Stevan and Kate, they went to the school in theoretical particle physics and now they are helping to develop this lecture. Me and Miroslava, we went to the school in string theory and then we were inside the geometry and topology physics course. Yeah, there are also many other conferences that we have been. Here is a picture of Professor Ashok and myself. We were discussing about the syllabus and the course structure for the courses next year. So we also do mentoring, which is assisting students from developing countries with knowledge acquisition and networking opportunities and promoting the scholarship opportunities worldwide. We will discuss this later on, but we can see how the seminar looks like. This is a picture of a student that he posted on social media where he is taking some notes from the lecture and these are some of our students discussing with Professor Alexander Tomasiello about string theory. So this is a list of our students for some of our courses. As you can see, we have students from all around Latin America, but we also have accepted the students from Iran, from India, China, and so on. This is also for the course in geometry and topology, where you can see we have even more students. So this is the distribution of people by country and role at Physics Latin. So you can see that our top four is in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela. But we also have countries like Cuba and the Dominican Republic on Duras, Nicaragua, and Panama. I hope people from these countries can join more to these activities. So our past courses, as I mentioned, was the quantum field theory. We have 30 students. Geometry and topology, four students and general relativity, 60 students. Please note that these courses are in a range of four to five months. We also have students also present seminars. Every course is evaluated with assignments, which are the 60% of the total score, 10% for seminars, and a final exam with 30%. So usually at the end of each course, each student should present a seminar with an advanced topic, or a little bit more advanced than the topic covered in the lecture. Also something that I want to point out is the students associated with Trieste are enrolling at Physics Latin. So this year, six Latin American students were accepted into the ICTP Diploma, in particular in High Energy Physics, Condense Matter and Mathematics, and five of these six students were enrolled at Physics Latin previously. So for example, in the course in QFT, we have Salin now doing Diploma at High Energy Physics. We also have Jonathan Pineda now doing the Diploma in Condense Matter. In Quantum Gravity, we have Juan Sebastián Morales doing Condense Matter now in the Diploma. In the Bright Geometry, we have Julian Alsate now doing the Mathematics Diploma at ICTP, and in the General Relativity course, we have Carlos Dessa now doing Condense Matter at Physics. But we also have some previous students at the Diploma, but they are now doing PhD at CISA. Who are Jonathan Pineda and Wayner Guido. Salin, the students feedback. I put a lot of them from our surveys, but I'm not going to read all of them. You can go into the slides and read it from the website. But I want to point out two, which are the first one is simply, thank you for this amazing course, for your dedication. I take with me an experience that I will never forget. Thank you. And the other one is this course was a very positive experience for me. By an academic development, I joined the course complicated emotional time and I'm leaving it with a high spirit. What you are doing for science in Latin America is admirable and I hope to give back what you have provided me at some point. Thank you. So these are really motivating feedback push-ups to continuing this project. Okay, so for the summer activities and the current activities, we have algebraic geometry course with 30 students. Classical in quantum blackboards with 20 students. We tried to keep the quantum field theory course every year, but now we have 70 students are rolling this course and the theoretical particle physics course with 40 students. But these two hasn't finished. It's expected to end in January. Seminars, seminars, and more seminars. If you haven't heard about physics Latin, probably it's because of our seminars. All our YouTube channel, as you can see, we host many, many seminars during the whole year with very nice professors, very distinguished researchers, as Professor Rajesh Gopakumar, Professor Ana Maria Fon, Senia Delaosa, ICTP director Fernando Quevedo, and so many others, like Richard Thomas, Thomas Dimitresco, Professor at ICTP Lothar Goshe, Tennis Hubrids. Well, so many. It will take me a while, but I want to put, these are not all that we have, but these are some that I want to show to you today. So we also have many courses and even at night. So we have two seminar series. One is mathematics and high energy physics seminars, and the other is physics at night. So usually physics at night is focused on many courses. They range from five to 10 lectures where we invite some professors to give some advanced topics in theoretical physics, for example, a blood-hole thermodynamics in concert charge, cross-sever program, which is a program which tries to describe mirror symmetry, super-stream theory, super-gravity, current status on blood-hole and information paradox, the statistical mechanics, quantum chromodynamics, fluxes in holonymy and stream theory, anomalies and generalized group symmetry, and so many others. We also promote academic opportunities. This was last week where we invited students to discuss and give us some hints and hacks how to apply to their particular program for master programs or PhD programs. As you can see here, this is a talk on how to apply to ICDP Diploma, how to apply to CISA, opportunities in the USA, applications in Canada and Spain, studies in China, in Tsinghua University, studies in Bonn University, opportunities in Bonn, Cologne, Germany, and opportunities in IQC and Emperimeter Institute. So for our future or next year, we will continue with the seminar series, we will have the mathematics and higher physics seminar which takes place every week, and also we will have a physics at night. Our first online conference is coming up soon, so we will have the first online conference for women in theoretical physics from Latin where we buy very recognized professors in their own field across Latin America to give talks. We will also have a section where the students can give a talk or contribute talks, and we also will have a discussion sessions where we will cover gender problems, mental problems, and more academic opportunities. So stay tuned, this will be very nice. We will also have courses again from March to July. We will have condensed matter field theory, quantum information theory, infinite dimensional B algebra, gauge gravity duality, and we will have again for each course several guest speakers, which usually are very recognized people in their own field. So if you want to apply, you have to keep in mind that these courses are in Spanish, and they are no more than one course at a time. So this is how it is going to look at least on our first half for next year. We will have these four courses. We are here right now. And to end, it's impossible without the incredible help of our team of volunteers. Here are all our volunteers for the year 2023. Big thanks to all of them, but more will be joined us for the next year. And finally, I want to thank to the ICTP and ICTP Physicists Without Frontiers, so Kate, Natasha, Margarita for all the support for our project and to all the other amazing projects today. If you want to volunteer with us, you can click this link, and these are all social media. And I want to wish all the best luck to Margarita and her new opportunities, and thanks for all the support through all this year. Thank you. Thank you very much, Daniel. Okay, do we have a... Yes, Daniel? I just want to say if anyone has a question, please go ahead. We have time for a very quick question. Or perhaps if no one has a burning question now, you couldn't... I see Sylvina. Hi, please go ahead. Hi Kate, this is Ateesh. Can you hear me? Hi Ateesh, yeah, we hear you. Okay, I'm sorry, my apologies for having me in Cambridge, UK. And I had some other meeting and there was a mix-up at the time, so I couldn't come at 1300. No problem, thank you. We will have your talk next if that's okay. We'll just have the one question from Sylvina to Daniel, and you can begin to share your slides. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Daniel, for the nice talk. I wanted to ask if you had any links with the ICTP in Sao Paolo, the ICTP saver, that they run regular courses and maybe they could help you with some of your activities. Oh, yeah, yeah, thank you. Actually, I have been in discussions with Professor Berkavish, which is director there. But yeah, there's nothing in concrete so far. But yeah, we are well aware of this. I know they have shared our seminars and also our courses to their students. Thank you. Okay, thanks to all of you and see you around. Yeah, thank you so much, Daniel. Your project is really inspirational to all of us. The reach you have is really incredible. Thank you. Okay, so let's move to Atish. Thank you so much for joining us, Atish, during your trip in the UK. You're welcome to share slides or give an introduction to everyone about ICTP. No, no, I just wanted to say hello to everybody. I think people know ICTP already. And I just wanted to congratulate all of you for doing a fantastic job. I think it's actually not frontier 10 years have passed and it has been a very successful programme. And we are working at ICTP, I would say, to expand it, trying to find new resources. So I just wanted to share this with you and also say hello to all the participants. My apologies for being late because I mixed up the time and I was in another meeting. So I would just say, bonne continuation. Thank you, Atish. Thanks so much for joining. We appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, so we can move on to our next talk, which is by Armand. Concur from Cameroon. Armand, can you share your screen? Can you hear us? We know there was a small, there was some problem with connection at the beginning. He said we should be okay. We can see your screen, thank you. Do you want to test your audio? And we can see your video. You should be unmuted now, Armand. We don't hear you. Yes, okay. Oh, we hear you now. Hello, hi, nice to see you. Thank you, thank you, hello, hello to everyone. I come from the University of Chang. And then there was an ICTP Physiculeal Frontier at the School on Climate Modelling to the 5th to 9th June 2023. And then Cameroon is located in Central Africa, as we can see in this picture. And then around Cameroon, we have here is Atlantic Ocean. And then around Cameroon in the northern part there is Chad and some other countries in the side. And here in the east part of Cameroon, there is one of the biggest forests in the world among the Amazon forest. And then that's why Cameroon is a very interesting country. Now the organizing committee of the project is as follows. The amount, as project coordinator from the University of Chang, there was also Graciano from ICTP and then my colleagues, Dr Ongena, from the same university as me, University of Chang, the same industry. And then for this school, there was 25 participants. Among the 25 participants, you have 12 men and 30 new men. And now you can see that there was a very good gender balance. The goal of the project as the goal, you can see that the long term goal of the summer school is to have more students rested by a question related to climate change. And the most specific goal is as you can see. The students acquire knowledge about climate modelling. It is important to remind that in our University of Chang, our faculty of Science, research about climate change and climate modelling is very recent. And now it is maybe the second year when this kind of question is stuck in this faculty. And now it is a very good pleasure, it was a very good pleasure to students to hear about climate change and climate modelling. And then the second objective was to learn what is the student has to learn what is the original climate model and how it can be used to investigate climate viability and also climate projection over some specific region. And the last objective was to acquire knowledge and practical programming to have atmospheric data. And yes, today I learned more about some programmes where how they can use Python to learn the climate data and also to get some plots. A motivation I had this project that climate change, as I said, and climate viability are not a great concern over all regions around the world and African regions in particular because of its low capacity of that adaptation of their inhabitants. And to contribute, to bring some contribution to address this concern, there was recently, as I said previously, created in the Faculty of Science of the University of Chang, a research laboratory in the laboratory of climate science physics. And therefore it was a good pleasure for the faculty to help. That's it. OK, I assume everyone else on Zoom can still hear us. We might have just lost Armand there. OK, so while we're waiting for Armand to rejoin, maybe we can go to the next talk and hear from Fabrizio and Farmesque. Are you both online? We have a talk from... Hi Fabrizio, nice to see you. Nice to see you. Let's go ahead and see if we can connect back to Armand in the next few minutes. Thank you. OK, let me share the screen. Can you see it? Perfect, thank you very much. So, good evening, and thank you for this opportunity. I am Fabrizio Scopiliti from Catania, from Italy and together with Farmesque from Kurdistan region of Iraq, I'm going to talk about teaching and promoting medical physics in her region. Kurdistan is not officially recognized state. It is divided into four territories, like Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and it's claiming for its independence. We were located in the northwest of Iraq, which is the Iraqi part of Kurdistan, and the seat we were located in is the Governorate of Soleimani. Medical physics was a brand new branch in Iraq in Kurdistan as there are no schools of specialization, and the new centers are starting to operate in nuclear medicine. So, after a period across Europe, Dr Abu Bakr proposed to introduce this topic into the University, so the use of ionizing radiation for nuclear medicine and radiopharmacy. For those of you who are not aware of what medical physics applied to nuclear medicine is, it is basically the concept is to produce a radioactive isotope which is, afterwards, put into a molecule. It becomes a radioactive pharmaceuticals. We perform quality controls on the radiopharmaceuticals in order to be able to inject the radiotracer, radiopharmaceutical to the patient, and after the drug is injected, we can see how the body is working, how the tissues are uptaking the pharmaceutical, and what's the behavior is. We are able to make diagnosis of these kinds of diseases. This is what we did, actually. In two years, in 2022 and 2023, we had two schools in two different universities, Cham Chamal and Soleil Mani, bringing the practical effectiveness of the use of the radiopharmaceutical in nuclear medicine and also radiotherapy. So, thanks to ICTP, we were able to bring some people from different parts of Europe, see Italy but also Holland and UK, to those two cities, yng Nghwliadau Gweithgol. Mae'r rhan o'r hyffordd yn cerddol yn rhan o'r cyfnod, i gael i ddweud y llif yn edrych yn ddechrau. Mae'n ddweud, mae'n ddweud, mae'n ddweud, ym mhwyaf o'r ymddangos a ymddangos yn gyfyrdd a'r sefydliad i'r hwn yn ddweud i'r hyffordd yn Penedig yng Nghyrch, yn Cwylwyr Ysgol. Mae'n ddweud am yma i'r cyfnodd a'r Cwylwyr Ysgol from different centres, where the application of this new techniques are going to be established. And this is what we found when we arrived to Cuddwysnodd, where we received an amazing welcoming, especially because the flights to Soleimania don't know why they arrived until 3 am, so they were really nice in coming and welcoming us really warmly. And during the time we held the schools, held the lectures in different universities, both public and private, because a lot of people were interested yn y gweithio newydd yng Nghymru. Mae ysgol yw'r ffordd yma yn 4 ddweud, ac mae'n 6 ym 5 o'r ffordd yma, ychydig yn ymddiol, a'r ystafell yn y ddweud, yn y ddweud yma'r profesiwnolau. Yn ymgyrch, ymgyrch, ymgyrch, ymgyrch, ymgyrch, ymgyrch. Ffantastic Proje ësgol yn y ddweud yma? Mae'r ffordd yma. Mae yw'r ffordd yma yn sestr unwyd yma i Feidlan, ac mae'r ffordd yn y ddweud. Mae chi'n gydig. Mae'n gydig. Mae'n gydig. Fodd am y ddweud efallai mae amser Feidlan. Fydda chi am y cwngor yw sy'n gweithio chi'n ffantastic. Hy. Fy fydd hon arian yw, fathaf cael ei wneud. Fydda chi? I can hear you again, thank you. Yes, I will face an internet problem and will be now with this. I see. Doctor, if you want to close the video, if you want to close the video you can because that will save on the bandwidth. Sorry for the interruption, sorry for that. I was saying that for the evaluation, we think we can talk about the capacity of students for doing practical work. And then also we save some feedback of the summer school given by students and also the willingness of students to participate in the career and the opportunity session. And that's what has helped us to evaluate our summer school. And then as media and communication strategist, we have seen us announcing the summer school around the university and also in another university in Cameroon. We have also uploaded daily photos to the drivers by a professional camera. And then they advertise also the physical front social media as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. And they also ask students to see their photo and make some comments in those social media. Do you hear me? I can hear you fine. Okay, thank you. At the activities of the school, that's two of the ICP physical frontier in Cameroon was a five day international training for students. We take two places at the Chang as we said, of the Chang School of Science and Technology, home from the fifth to the ninth during the year 2020 trim. And they stood at the school, brought together 25 participants from three universities in Cameroon, including the University of Chang as the House University, University of the Island of Wanda. This is in the center region of Cameroon and also University of Duala, that is in another part of the Cameroon. And participants had the opportunity to try test and improve their skills and competence and gain more new ideas, methods and also theoretical inputs for their research on climate. The activity ended with a standing ovation to the ICP for their supports, without which the school would not be possible. As mentioned in the speech during the closing ceremony, all students have been very happy for the various activities of the school. And we hope that this inspiration and motivation gained through the training will lead to more prepared participants for their future career in the area of climate modernity. And as photo, this is the photo of the opening ceremony with the gene of the faculty of science in the middle. And then you have a participant and some other colleagues in the University of Chang. And then you can also see Grasiano from ICP. And the last photo is the closing ceremony. You can see each participant with each attestation of participation. And then also some organizer, as me, as Nick, and Dr Angina and Grasiano from ICP. And you'd like to thank Kate for its support and also Grasiano, we've broken more about the success of this group. And for that, thank you again Kate for your valuable advice and contribution. Thank you. OK, so what a wonderful programme you've been organising. Thank you again, Dr Concuror. Do we have any questions? Put your hand up or you can speak or turn your video on. If you'd like to ask a question. Yes please, Mohammed, please go ahead. Thank you. My question is, what did you choose at the university? Why not the University of Marwa? Good question. OK, thank you very much for your question. Why another university in Cameroon? As I said, I am from the University of Chang. And then I was working at the University of Chang to implement research in climate modelling and climate science. And then in the second year for that research centre in the University of Chang. And that's why we've chosen the University of Chang to spread information about this new social media in our university. Thank you. OK, thank you. Thank you, Mohammed, for the nice question. Thanks again, Oman, for a really nice presentation. And we look forward to working with you again next year. Thank you. Thank you. So we will move on to our next talk. Abhishek, I can see you already. Thank you very much for sharing your slides. We're going to hear about some fantastic work in Rwanda. Good afternoon, everyone. Can you hear me clearly? Nice. And you can see my slide, right? Perfect. Good afternoon, everyone. I am Abhishek Kumaradag. And the title of my presentation is Physics Without Frontiers Computational Material Science in Rwanda. So I am presenting on behalf of the organizing committee of this school, Omululu Akinoso. He was the... Any problem? I thought someone asked something. So I am presenting on behalf of the organizing team, which consists of Omululu Akinoso, who was, at that time, was the local organizer and director of AIFAR, Rwanda, and Nathasa Stoic and myself. At that time, I was a postdoc in CMSP and Nathasa was a long-term visiting scientist. And now Nathasa C is a co-coordinator of PWF activities in ICD. So as we all know, Rwanda is a small yet very beautiful country in the sub-Saharan Africa. It has a pleasant weather throughout the year and along with its rich cultural heritage. In Rwanda, computational material science is not an active field of research. There has been some earlier notable efforts. A few workshops and training exposures were conducted to train the students to use the quantum chemistry software for computational work on material science. And we came to know that there is an undergraduate physics course with specialization in material science at the University of Rwanda, but the course primarily focuses on experimental aspect of material science. So we felt that there is a need of conducting a school in computational material science and also we understand that in sub-Saharan Africa, the Rwanda is one of the top performing countries in education and research. So we had a feeling that a wider impact of this kind of school and activity will be on this kind of whole region. And earlier there were a few localized efforts to develop this computational material science field in AIFAR Kigali. And as I already introduced, Omululu, the former director of AIFAR, was one of them. And he had a few students working under him who were working on these projects also. But the gist of this thing is that we needed a dedicated activity open for the whole university of Rwanda students from different disciplines in Kigali. In this way, we expect that we can reach a large number of students in Kigali. So coming to the organizing team, Omululu was the local organizer. And Nathasai and I was the organizer. And we were planning the program and the talk and the hands-on session. And we both were at that time a member of the CMSP, ICDP, Condencement Unit in ICDP. And here is the participants. You can see the nice picture of the participants along with the organizers. And we really enjoyed the workshop. And if you come to the statistics, you can see among the participants, there are majority participants from the physics background, followed by the chemistry background. There are few from the engineering, biochemistry, biotechnology and masters in material science streams. So overall, we had really a diverse group of participants. But mostly the participants are from University of Rwanda and the neighboring institute in Kigali. As we are unable to afford accommodation for the participants who are visiting from the neighboring countries. Our goal was to make computational material science accessible and popular among the students in different disciplines, particularly physics, chemistry and engineering. And also our plan was to revisit the basic understanding of theoretical formulations at the fundamental level. And also to expose the students from undergraduate and masters level to the modern day computational techniques and softwares and the packages what we use in our normal research. Also to motivate the students to start learning computational science and getting used to basic analysis and notations during their under-graduation or post-graduation studies. So among 50 participants, we have noticed that 32 participants are regular. They attended the full duration of school. So we awarded certificates to them and we are very happy that out of 32 there were 11 women scientists on board or women students on board. So here are the lovely pictures from our workshop. You can see there are like offline and online activities going on. And we conducted in-person lectures and presentations. Also there are few online interactions with experts from like different parts of the world. And our expert introduced topics of their expertise and they described the state of the field and their preferred computational tool. As in our field there are many computational tools with varied range of accuracy and the computational speed. So they described the pros and cons of those packages. There were many hands-on sessions throughout the week. It was a one-week school and fully packed school for that whole week. And the keynote of the conference was the career opportunity session which was conducted by Natasa. And that really attracted huge interest among the students. They were really keen to know how they can move during their higher education, how they can apply and abroad. They can make their CVs and they were really excited in this session. Also we provided like there was opportunities for networking during the coffee breaks and lunch we had together. And it was very interactive and they were like really asked many questions. And another attraction of the school was student presentation. We did small projects in the final two days of the workshop. And the student then they presented their results on the small projects. So you can see the students are presenting their results. Those are nice electronic property studies using this like different kind of packages of computational material science. And they were like students are generally given small model projects. They worked in a group of two to four students in a team and they discussed among themselves and they solved the problem. And you can see they are presenting their work and it was really nice because they had the idea why they are working on that problem, what was the point they should focus on, the basic concept. So we felt very satisfied when they were presenting with a lot of confidence in front of other students and the organisers. Here is the full team of PWA volunteers and organisers from LEVED. The Omululu was a that time director of AFER and local organisers. And from ICTP there was Nathasa, Mysel, Martina, Uriel, Nicola and Yvonne. And Adhu, he was a former PhD student at ICTP CSAP PhD program. And he was also a diploma student at ICTP. And Sogona was there from JNCSR India. She is a well-known female woman in science activist in the world. So coming to the impact of the workshop, you can see in the bar chart that these five means that they were extremely satisfied with the workshop, like how they expected the workshop to go that matches with their expectation. And we have more than like around 75% of aligning to that. Out of the all feedback, 75% of the students feel that it was very helpful. And 22% feels that it was very much exciting. And three means they are really happy with the experience. So overall we received a lot of positive and constructive feedback from the participants. And you can see on the left one of the participants. He is an undergraduate chemistry students and he was very happy. He told that it was a very nice experience for him. He gained some new skill and computational technique and to study and design nanomaterials or materials. And he also feels that the knowledge and skill he acquired in the workshop or school that will greatly enhance his academic journey. Also we had some nice message from Vincent. We are very happy to hear from Vincent that he feels that our workshop has asked or pushed him to continue his masters in physics. Because sometimes we really get like little fatigued in our daily routine and sometimes this kind of workshop really motivates and like refresh your journey. So we are happy to be a part of the journey of Vincent and there are a few other feedbacks. Those are like we have put here from the feedback from so we really don't know who has told these nice words for us. But we are really happy that we had the opportunity to conduct this school there. So coming to the conclusion slide, we name it success stories and plan for the future. So we feel that it was a very successful format allowing many like thoughtful exchange and discussion among the volunteers and experts. Also we had a large group of PWF volunteers mostly from ICTP and around the world. They had expertise in different topics. They introduced their field from different angle and different backgrounds. The organisers are still in touch with the students and trying to help their in their future steps to becoming a material scientist in their higher education. And another key takeaway from the conference was the effectiveness of this kind of activity was seen in the international SSMA 2023 school. The SSMA is an advanced computational material science school. So our school really helped the students to set the stage for the SSMA and they were really helpful. The 10 out of 32 students attended SSMA school and they were really happy that they had the stage to follow the SSMA study modules. And also for future activities, we are seeking for the larger supports from the volunteers to the organisers. And we are looking forward to conduct such similar kind of activities in future. Thank you very much. Have a nice day. I am open for the questions. Thank you very much. This course looks absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for presenting it today. Do you have any questions from the room or on Zoom if you want to put your hand up? Yes, I have a question. Yes, please go ahead. Yes, so thank you very much for this very interesting talk. I was just wondering because I think this was sort of a practical activity where people had to probably bring their... Did people have to bring their own participants, bring their own laptops or did... How did you go around, get around the laptops because I think you needed to use these? Yes, yes. So we kind of planned for the situation that some students will not come with the laptop and there will be some internet issues with the internet connections and that was true. What we planned for. There is a set up, modest set up in AFIR in the University of Rwanda where the ICTP sister institute AFIR is there. There is a modest set up but the internet connection is not up to the mark. So we had to previously compile all the software and packages we will teach and we will demonstrate in the workshop. So we went with that kind of all the softwares and all Tokigallee and we installed them in the computers there. But we noticed that many students came with their own laptop though the internet connection was not that great. But if you plan to bring the software and packages with you in the pen drive or the memory stick or hard drive then you can quickly arrange those things in the starting days of the workshop and it is possible. We felt it is possible to conduct. Okay, well thanks a lot. Awesome. Thank you for the question. Anything further? If not, thank you so much to Abishak and thanks also to Natasha and the rest of your team for this fantastic project. So next up on the agenda I think we have Daniel who will be talking about his projects. He's been organizing in biophysics and other areas and the project he did this year in Kenya. Please go ahead Daniel. Thanks. Can you see my screen? Thank you. Yes. Perfect. Thanks. I will give an overview of the biophysics activities I've been doing in Africa. This year I have done activity in Kenya with the Physics Without Frontiers. And the first of years, the previous activity is the activity in Kenya. And it was in Eridolet at the University of Eridolet in Kenya. So this biophysics course, this year's course is a month of the past five, six years of activities I have been organizing and teaching young scientists in Africa. So we started in 2018 in Tanzania. We had 28 participants. We did there again in 2019. We had two schools in the same year. And in 2020 we had another school. In 2021 it was a hybrid. And in 2022 we had another two schools. One was in Malawi and another in Tanzania. And this year, of course, I have won the school in Kenya. And also I participated in the other school. Though it was not a physics without frontiers, I was in Camelun in Bahia. So the idea of these schools, they focus on biophysics and the measures is trying to promote understanding of the biological systems at molecular scales. Trying to understand how we can manipulate the materials at molecular levels. So that is the motivation and the idea of the schools. And we have been moving with the same approach for the past five years. So this year's activity in Kenya, we focused on leveraging some quantum mechanics, some molecular mechanics approach, cofnidwys molecular dynamics for life science. This year in comparison with the previous year, it was a bit different but very successful, I can say. So the idea that we had very few participants were a total of 15 participants. Mainly half of more than 70% were coming from physics and other from other disciplines like chemistry and also from biological theory of them. And we have few professors that were teaching the course. So many of them were two lecturers. One in molecular dynamics and one in quantum mechanics. So then the school in Kenya was for two weeks and the first week was comprised of several activities including project and trying to teach the fundamental aspects of molecular dynamics and using toy models. So this time we did not use a real life system and instead so we started first teaching them about the very fundamental basics about programming. And then we started teaching about molecular dynamics, learning the insight about it and learning development and writing some code to molecular dynamics and trying to test and trying to learn. And then at the end we gave some projects to the student and then they were working in groups. What we did is that we gave some toy models for example, we gave the famous that, how this is working, why is it behaving like this. So the student they have to find it out, the reason why this is behaving, why this is working like this and they have to present what they have found. So it was really interesting and it gave them an idea of how these tools and the system can be used to understand biological systems. And the school has been very successful, not only the current school in Kenya. As I mentioned that this is a series of the previous schools. The schools that we did in 2021 and the final this year we have published a paper with the student that we continued mental after the school. So we want to continue again with the same spirit for the school we had this year that we need again to continue with another project. And at the end we will publish maybe another second paper from the school. It takes time, there's a lot of challenges, there's difficulties sometimes managing the online classes with different people from different places. There's a lot of challenges, internet connection sometimes and also the time and the flexibility is challenging. So for here that you can see the number of authors is few compared to the number of the students that participated in 2021 because others they dropped along the way but others managed to go up to the end of the race. So we are happy that from where we started the biophysics schools in Africa. At least we have one PhD already completed, we have one masters already completed. And now we have like four MS ongoing others they are submitting the thesis for examination. We have one or two degree bachelor degree students who are interested in the way of starting training them. So now the field although it is very relative near the continent but there is a good progress as I can see. And physics results frontier and ICTP in general have contributed massively to make the program and land misery in the continent. And I'll continue striping to make sure that we have the schools learning throughout the continent as I've been moving to different parts of the continent or bringing the student in Tanzania or I go to the different country to train them. So while in Kenya we managed to also to meet with the administrators talking to them telling them about the over objective of the school, the photos that we see in the right was talking to the registrar of the university and trying to explain the in and out benefits, the advantages and why we should have the school in Kenya. In particular at the investor Eric Loret. And to the left figure is the participants of the students while they were working in their group work or in their project. So we are progressing very good I can say in Africa for the side of biophysics and it is now a very good interest and the community is growing very strong. So we are planning that maybe in every next year we will be bringing again a project that will restart with the student from Kenya and the other student who previously attended the other biophysics schools to have a common project that we will end up with a very certificate like this one. So this the paper we told them that this is the certificate we are awarding you. Yes, we give you the certificate signed by the university vice chancellor and whatever but this is the nice project a certificate we offer from the activity. So this is in brief of what we have been doing in Africa by biophysics and this was in Kenya and the general in Africa. Thank you and thanks a lot for your attention. Thank you Daniel. Thank you Daniel a really impressive school you ran this year but also what you've been doing over the several years. It's been really fantastic. We have time for a quick question from the room or if you'd like to raise your hand on Zoom. If not we can move on just to save time but thank you so much Daniel and we're really looking forward to working more with you next year. Thank you. So we can move now to Ecuador to speak to Hernan who I can see is connected. Hi there. Hello, can you hear me? Yes we hear you very well. Can you see my screen now? Yep, perfect. Thank you. Go ahead. First of all thanks to Organizer for giving me the chance to talk today about our project with Physics Without Frontiers which is called Epic Stream. It is a programming school that in this year was titled the Frontiers of Computational Physics. So let me give you a brief introduction on who we are first. So we are a group of researchers and they are called a group of investigations at Institute Zero. So we were basically a group of friends that we started to get a physics in Ecuador 12 years ago. And nowadays we are living in different parts of the world. Some of them are back in Ecuador. Some other people are working in Spain, France, in the US and myself working in Germany nowadays. So we are also different stages of our careers, postdocs or PI positions. And a few years ago, three years ago we came with the idea of trying to give a little bit back to Ecuador. And we will identify one of the biggest problems that we have in the curriculum of physics in Ecuador. And it's the lack of well established computational programs. Our programs to study computational matters in general in Ecuador. So that is why Epic appeared. So Epic comes from the Spanish escuela de programación para investigación científica. And the idea is that we all realize that there is a high importance in the computational analysis to understand complex problems in physical and life science. But unfortunately in Ecuador, as I said before, another very well structured scientific program on these matters and also not for data analysis. So usually young students have to just do it by themselves. So what we wanted to provide is an opportunity to establish an annual series of a school of programming for scientific research in general. And with this we wanted basically to get into two goals. The first is to give the opportunity to the students to learn a state of our computational methods for physics and life science. And the second one that we also think is very important is to provide young students in Ecuador spaces to interact with experts in their fields. And then with this we try to increase the networking. So let me go a bit further on what was Epic and then a bit of the timeline that would happen. So the first time that we did our programming school was in October 2021. So this in the first attempt we had 20 students and young professionals in Ecuador and it was a session totally online. Then we tried in 2022 again. So in this case in that year we increased a bit to 23 students. We did it still online and then we already had the support of the program Physics Without Frontiers. By finally this year in August we managed to do it for the very first time in person. So one of the major not complaints but requests of the students in the previous editions of the Epic was that it was fully online. So they wanted to have something in person. But unfortunately we didn't have the funding the last two years. But this year finally we got sponsored by the program Physics Without Frontiers. And we had the chance to have the first time Epic in person. So we counted with 30 students and that will give you a bit more of the details. So this is a picture of all the attendance in the programming school this year. So we had more than 80 applications from five different universities in Ecuador and one in Peru. From these more than 80 applications we select based on motivation letters, 30 students, 21 from Ecuador and one from Peru. So there was a student that she actually managed to get her own funding from the university to travel from Peru to Ecuador for the one week summer school. Which I find is super cool. Unfortunately also for the limitation on the funding we could not invite the other students from Peru. But we hope that for the next editions we get a bit more funding also to provide travelling expenses that are a bit more expensive. That we could provide travelling expenses within Ecuador but outside Ecuador was a bit more complicated. We have 30 female and then 70 male students in total. All of them, 80% of the students were with a background in physics but 20% were also with background in computer science. So that was also nice this year in comparison with the last two years where we had only students from physics. So this time we also have students from the computer science programs in Ecuador. All the students that were selected were either in the last semesters of the bachelor or preparing the bachelor thesis in Ecuador. So it was students that had quite some good background and could participate in the school. So how was Epic a bit? So we have, we will not go in all the technical details on how we started just wanted to give you some major points of what we had. So we had a set of different lectures and talks. So we managed to have at the end 10 volunteers from Ecuador, Germany, Slovakia and France. So most of them either our initial group or friends of us that gave most of them lectures on site but also some online lectures. So in addition to that, so one of the most important parts of our school were the hands-on tutorials and probably part of the students enjoyed the most. So we had four tutorials in different fields of physics going from particle physics to astrophysics and machine learning. So we wanted to make our school as broad as possible in terms of topping and then mostly focus on the methods. So the students had the opportunity to learn about different fields but trying to focus on how to use programming tools to approach different problems in science. So here are some of the pictures of the students in the H.I. University that was the place where we were realizing this in the north of Ecuador. And then at the end we closed it with the students presentation that was a super nice activity as well where we have 10 groups of three students. So the students were making these groups to work in small projects along the one week of the program in school and the last day they had the chance to present the projects. So this was a great experience not only for the students but also for us to see how easy they can learn and how they can build up small projects in actually one week. So it was very satisfying. So in the last part I wanted to show some of the students experiences. So I would cite just a couple of comments from them. So Maria Elizabeth said as a woman in the scientific world the opportunity to be part of FQ3 fostered my scientific curiosity and provide me with the tools to approach new problems from the programming perspective. Alexis said I wanted to express my heartfelt gratitude for the incredible opportunity to be part of the epic three focus on machine learning and computational physics that we has been an invaluable experience in reaching my knowledge and understanding ways I could not have imagined. And also one nice one that we got from Brian is like that. I think it also summarized what the summer school was was a great friends wonderful experience and a lot of knowledge summary of what the page three was. So it was a great chance for the students not only to learn knowledge but also to get some of the working between them different universities but also with the with the different different volunteers that were there. So with this we managed to do actually some follow up with the students. So in this short term we are starting to bachelor thesis with two of the volunteers. So some of the students that were finishing are starting to work in two bachelor thesis with us. So three of them that were working on the thesis are also now applying to master programs with a bit of our support and a little bit of guidance for that. And we have also one student that is working an independent project that he is taking on site of the of his of his bachelor thesis. So and the last thing that I would like to mention is that we have some extra follow ups. So we have some applications not only from bachelor students but also from high school students. So we didn't want to let them out. So we create during this today during the week of the of the epic like almost on the fly what we call the epic junior. There was basically one day where we invite the students from high school to see what we can do in terms of computational science. And for this we get the actually the help of the participants from the from the from the epic three. And then finally we managed to have an extra follow up. So we have now running a coding challenge with most of the students by the who participate in the in the epic three in the programming school. So now we are running these coding challenge and then we hope to have the results in a couple of weeks with this. I just want to finish and without I don't want to finish it without taking to physics well from this because they actually make it possible to happen this time in person for us. And then I'm happy to take any questions. What's going on here? So do we have any questions? You can put your hand up in the chat or anyone in the room? Yes please. What was the most challenging aspect of this activity for you? For us as a volunteer the most difficult thing was to try to do it with people from different backgrounds. Because we had the people with computer science that were super good at programming but not so much into the topics of the physics. And they had some students from physics which didn't have a good programming background. So trying to put the courses together for different backgrounds was quite quite a challenge. I think we tried to we managed at the end but we we hope that we will improve also for the next time. Great thank you. And we look forward to epic four which hopefully will be taking place next year. Yeah we hope so too. We will apply for sure. Perfect. All right thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Thank you for the presentation. Thanks to you. So our next talk will be from Nepal. So we have Kieran connected. Hi Kieran do you hear us? Perfect. We did see your screen. So can you see my screen? Yes we see it again. Thank you Kieran. Okay I think my video is turned off. The video is turned off don't worry if it's a problem. Okay okay so let me start by thanking for inviting me to this event and thank you. So to say something about Holographic Himalaya it's a physics research club or let's say journal. It's mostly online focus and we have successfully and now we are planning for the second year. And to say about Himalaya not just Nepal but the southern part of China such as North and part of Pakistan hope we can go outside Nepal. So that's the plan. And I think members I'm Kieran Odikari and I'm a student of physics. I'm doing my piece in the centre you have a lesson for more than 15 years in Nepal. We wanted to have a very cost effective way and when we knew that because of course it gives a validity to our initiative but also provides a possibility for international networking. And on the right we have Rajab Singh who is an expert in cosmology and who later joined us as a mentor and part of our organizing team. And of course I have to give special thanks to Kate, Natasha, Margarita and Professor Nogarmi in Nepal who has been guiding us throughout the program. And again to start for all the editing emails to Margarita regarding the request stuffs. So now let's talk about the motivation of our program. So there are many physics enthusiastic students in Nepal and who wants to pursue fundamental and theoretical physics. Of course theoretical physics is financially less expensive than experimental one but there is no proper environment inside the country for doing this. And there are many reasons for that and it has to do with a lack of opportunity, resources and appropriate guidance. So we want to solve these kind of problems by providing some kind of opportunity to interested bachelor and master students. And in the future we want to establish Nepal and this reason as a country that can significantly contribute to science and physics. And one field that we are particularly motivated is the field of quantum information and quantum gravity. So there are not many experts in this field in Nepal so there is a vacuum in knowledge and we want to put that. So this brings us to the title of our research club which is holographic Himalay. So this also is the theme of our journal club and it is about quantum information of space time and matter. And it's related to the idea in physics that quantum information could be a bridge between these two different fields of physics like generativity and quantum mechanics. So hopefully these students will be able to get into like, they would have the flavor of all kind of physics like from generativity, quantum mechanics, quantum information. So that's the idea. And so the program is like mostly online and in the beginning like we had around 190 applicants and we selected around 35 students and they are from the journal club. The journal club is mostly online and we have regular international talks like we have talks given by international experts and they provide tutorials. I mean we provide tutorials and other possible career paths in science and you might be wondering that it's mostly via Zoom so is it effective or not. I mean we found out that if the students are motivated enough then it really can be effective. So the journal club program, our whole research club it ran for over six months so if you don't have a motivated students then this will not be successful but like I said in the motivation there are many motivated students. But I mean some students drop like if you see we started with 35 students but at the end I mean we were able to find a certificate to only 21 students so some of them drop in the middle. And let's see like some of the activities that we did and so we had talks given by experts once a month and the interesting thing is that sometimes the experts they follow up on the progress of the journal club. I mean they follow up and they are even willing to mentor students and this is actually how Rajiv Singh with the expert in cosmology and he was willing to mentor students. So that was quite nice of him. And the second kind of activity that we have is a bi-weekly meeting in Zoom and the students they are divided into group and like we have four groups and the students are divided in four groups and they are given a project. Karen, do you hear us? Two papers. Sorry, can you hear me? Yes we do hear you now, thank you. We lost you for one moment. Okay, so maybe I will go from. We have group discussion which happened mostly in Zoom and students like we have four groups and each group is given a project which I mean depending on their interest and they work for almost six months on the project and they are also given the opportunity to use this project for their bachelor or master thesis. And this picture, I mean this is a picture which did not happen in Zoom so they got together and this is from one particular group. Okay, so like I said, one thing that we are really proud is that we were able to release two research papers and the third one is in progress. And if you see the one paper it's quite mathematical but the other one it's more application oriented and this paper called Quantum Optimisation for Bosses of Kathmandu. So this paper is related with, I mean this paper has to do with solving real problems in Kathmandu NEPA. So the idea is like we try to work in three different kind of topics like one which is more rigorous and well defined problems. And the second kind of problem is which is more related with application oriented. And the third kind of problem is it's quite wide like you're allowed to do, I mean to crazy stuff. So one is very rigorous, the second one is application oriented and the third one is wide ideas. So all three kind of ideas are welcome and the one thing that we found out is that especially branch of physics like statistical physics, it can be really useful for solving socio-economic problems in countries like Nepal or in any countries. So you can use physics to solve real problem. So that's quite interesting. Finally, the student gave their presentations and members from ICTP physics with the front they were also welcome in final presentation. So this gave them a chance to practice their presentation skills. And so some of the students they participated in international program and they found the involvement in physics with our fronted programs to be very beneficial. And some of the ways, I mean we help them was like by providing them recommendation later or helping create their applications. They are interested in applying for foreign energy, hope is that after different degree they also try to help the situation in Nepal. And the one example is Eva here exhibited in a summery school in China and she found the experience in holographic emailing to be fruitful and she offered to work in Mexico. And second year now and at the moment we are still in the selection process for new students. And one thing that we learned is that this program is like this research club it runs for over six months. So some of the students they quit in mid season. So it has to I mean there are many reasons for that and of course the program is quite intense. So what we want to do is like we want to accept more students and give them more chances and yeah. And also the other thing that we want to focus is in more outreach programs and in fact on December 8 this month we want to do a physical program here. And so far we were doing in Zoom and now like we want to do a real physical program and we're inviting people from government and ministries and universities so that we can remind them the importance of science and research. And also like we want to include larger voluntary including the alumni. So thank you and if you have any questions I would be very happy to answer. Do we have any questions please for Karen. So I saw one question in the chat. I don't know if this person who posted it would like to ask it. OK, yeah. The question was about the gender balance. Is there a way that we can improve the number of females participation? Oh yes. So I mean we received only very few applicants from female and we're really trying to work on that. So as you can see like here just 16 male and 5 female. I mean so we want to do like so I don't know how to how to improve that. I mean maybe like we on December 8 we are planning a program and so let's see what happens there. And not only that like especially in country like Nepal. I mean there are many ethnic group who really lack opportunity. So we have to give them opportunity. I mean it's quite difficult to balance. Yeah I think that's an excellent point and it's something we're very eager to work with you more on. In order to encourage minority groups in science you really do need to reach out and it does take some work. So I think that's something we can support you with Karen. And of course if anybody else from the community has good ideas of ways that we can achieve that. Please do always get in touch with us. Yes. Can I just make a comment? Oh yes please go ahead. Is that Vikram? Yeah yeah. Please. Just because there was a question regarding the female participation. So I mean since we're talking about Nepal we also did a project as you know to increase the participation of girls in science in higher education. In Nepal particularly. So we did a Physics Without Frontiers project last year as well. So it's looking in that aspect as well. Like going forward in the future there will be more girls like pursuing physics and other sciences going forward in higher education. So that was the motivation behind that other project. Thank you Vikram. Yes the project. Yes. So yeah like we're also happy to work with that ICTB program as well. For sure. Thank you so much and we will follow up with both of you. Thank you Vikram and Karen and thank you for the question. Okay so we have our final talk today. We have Ralph online. Professor Ralph Keiser. Hello. How are you? Hi Kate. I hope you can hear me. We hear you fine. If Karen you can stop sharing your screen for us. Thank you. Go ahead Ralph please. Okay I'll try and share my screen. There you go. No that's not quite ideal. Is this okay? It looks good. Just one second ago something was different. It was full screen. Yeah I tried to make it full screen. It's now full screen for me. I can do this again. Is this better? I think that's fine. It's big enough for everyone to see. Thank you. Okay. First of all thank you very much for having me. Apologies that I wasn't there for the entire meeting. Essings happened. I had a preparatory meeting for the COP conference in Dubai. That was right in the middle of this. I had to skip out so I just saw a few of the presentations at the beginning and a few presentations at the end. Thank you very much to all the speakers. I'm impressed with the range of activities and actually with the size of the program as it is. So let me go ahead and recap this a little bit. So this year Physics Without Frontiers has organized 17 projects with many additional activities and events. And again thank you to everybody for their presentations today. In addition to the ones that were presented today there were many other activities. For example the one in Ghana that was led by Physics Without Frontiers volunteer and scientist Rene Oppo Kuntim. Probably pronounced it really badly. Apologies. On machine learning and our programming. A workshop in Bhutan on developing effective teaching, cutting edge research and global collaboration. That was led by Kate and Paso Ram Sharma. An event in Nepal at the National Innovation Centre to promote science education for girls in Nepal that by Vikram Upadhyay. A hackathon was actually 78 students from eight Latin American countries in Latin America. That's really quite big and I'm very impressed with that. And the seven-day Physics Without Frontiers roadshow in Nepal promoting physics to university students by Dr. Silvio Kresta and Abha Eli. Thank you very much. Also do those that are not here today to present their projects themselves. Now to next year and let me before I look at the slide go back to a little bit earlier this week. So I don't know if Natasha mentioned that already. But Natasha and I were part of an ICTP delegation to a UNESCO meeting in Paris earlier this week where we also presented Physics Without Frontiers. I believe that the feedback that we got from UNESCO was very positive and I do hope that in the future when we talk to our UNESCO colleagues about actually doing projects together, Physics Without Frontiers project can be such projects and I hope that working with our colleagues at UNESCO will allow us to do even more activities in the future. So next year, Physics Without Frontiers will expand its mentoring scheme and expand to more countries. We'd like you all to be involved. If you want to be a volunteer or a mentor for our students please send an email to us at pwf.acitp.it and if you want to volunteer to organise the projects please apply in our annual call in February 2024. You can subscribe to our mailing list if you're not already on it, which I assume you probably are or check out our web pages. Our web pages are going to develop and continue and we're, as a matter of fact, looking into creating an alumni scheme at ICTP and generally increasing our virtual presence. That's not really completely ready yet so I can't give you a presentation on that but watch this spot. I think we will have some interesting things to do there in the future. So I'd like to hand back to Kate. Thank you all very much for being here today and thank you on behalf of ICTP. Thank you, Ralph. Thank you, Ralph. That was a really nice summary talk. Say thank you again to all of our speakers today and everybody here in the room. We will have a small reception for some drinks now. Sorry that you can't join us, Ralph. We will hopefully have a reception drink with you later on when you're back from your travels. Absolutely. Thank you, Kate. Thank you. First of all, we will close the meeting. We've gone slightly over time but really thank you so much to everybody. We really appreciate your participation and we really want to get more involved working with you all. So thank you and we will stay in touch. Say thank you. You can all wave on your participation emojis. Thank you and goodbye. Bye-bye from Nigeria here. Bye. I think we have now a small reception together. Say thank you.