New video: NMI3-II - The benefits of European Collaboration

In a new video, members of the project tell us about the advantages of collaborating at the European level.

Date: 04/12/2015
Source: nmi3.eu

NMI3-II: The benefits of European Collaboration

NMI3 is a consortium of the main neutron and muon facilities in Europe, and is funded by the European Union. It counts a total of 18 partner organisations from 12 countries. All project activities thus involve trans-national collaboration between different institutes. Whereas such partnership might be difficult to manage, it facilitates development of new instruments and techniques to serve the broader neutron scattering and user communities.

In this new video, you can learn about the benefits of this collaboration as well as the feedback we received from the European Commission, by the NMI3 Manager and Coordinator, scientists, and school organisers.

Some of the main advantages of NMI3 are the following:

Integration: Miriam Forster is the NMI3 Project Manager who keeps things running and makes sure that deliverables and reports are sent timely to the EU. Mark Johnson is the Coordinator of the project, who looks at the broader picture to ensure that the objectives are achieved. As Miriam and Mark point out, projects like these facilitate an efficient use of resources, avoiding unnecessary repetition between facilities. Given that NMI3 is a well-established consortium, the project is running rather smoothly.

Organisation and Collaboration: Tobias Schrader (JCNS) and Matt Barrett (HZB) from the Soft & Bio Materials Joint Research Activity (JRA), Svyatoslav Alimov (HZB) from the Detectors JRA, and Nikolay Kardjilov (HZB) from the Imaging JRA are scientists, members of the project. They tell us how taking part of NMI3 helped them organising their work better, which significantly accelerated their research developments. Having the opportunity to interact frequently with scientists from both their field of neutron scattering and other methods, proved to be insightful. It provided them with new ideas and understanding on the requirements of neutron scattering users, so that they can focus their work on those.

Mobility: The video also contains audio interviews with Kurt Clausen from PSI and Martin Müller from HZG, who are organisers of schools that have received financial support from NMI3. They say support was fundamental to give international students the opportunity to learn about neutron scattering or muon spectroscopy. The project also facilitated meetings between the school organisers, who collected new ideas and formats to improve their schools’ programme.