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Published 25 June 2012 by Beatrice Lugger

Insights in the scientific life of 6 young researchers

‚Where do you come from?’, ‚What is your special subject?’, ‚How are conditions for research in your country?’ – these and many other questions are some you might hear during the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting very often. No wonder. In Lindau 580 young researchers from nearly 70 countries come together. All with different backgrounds and experiences.

Six of them now give us their answers in words and pictures. In their first films,

  • Albert Juma from Kenya – acutally working at Helmholtz Center in Berlin
  • Casey Schwarz from the USA
  • Ghada Bassioni from Egypt
  • Harsha Reddy from India
  • Heather Gray from South Africa – actually working at CERN
  • and Pascal Neibecker from Germany

tell us, what they expect from their week in Lindau, which institution helped them to become a Lindau fellow. The first of her films are now going online. And at the end of the meeting they will give us a summary of their impressions.

 

 

Pascal Neibecker is escpecially looking forward to meeting Dan Shechtman: "Such quasi crystals as he discovered them can also be observed in the alloy I am working with.” The 23-year-old student examins aluminum, lithium and copper alloys, such as those being used in the booster tanks of the Ariane rocket. Particularly exciting for Neibecker is how "Shechtman has bitten through, although no one believed in his idea."

Neibecker himself is obviously very consistently going his way. The native German has participated in the junior degree program in materials science at the University of Saarland while he was still going to school. Afterwards he could make the Atlantis Bachelor in a special EU-funded program for materials science and engineering – there were a semester at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden and two semesters at Oregon State University in the United States. Due to his previous juniour studies, he shortened the period of study from eight to six semesters and had at the end two bachelor degrees – one in in materials science and the other in mechanical engineering – in the pocket.

Now he is in the second term of the master’s programme at the Technical University of Munich. This why the Elite Network of Bavaria helped him to join the Lindau meeting. Neibecker therefore did an interview with coordinator Beate Lindner.

Despite all determination, Neibecker is very considerate. His quintessence of the scientific carreer of his idol, Shechtman is: "You should not only align your research on topics which seem that one where you might succeed as quickly as possible. Perhaps it is just the niche on which sou should stay tuned.” Who knows, maybe Neibecker will even discover such a niche for himself during the Meeting of Nobel Laureates and report about it at the end.


More videos of the young researcher’s video team are and will be uploaded in our video section the next days. First of them are from Ghada Bassioni, Egypt. She describes her ambition: “Explaining what it is like to be a woman in a man’s world (physics)!”   

 


Further videos – added later

 

Heather Gray wants to get a feeling for exciting new ideas at Lindau

Establishing friendships will be very important to P. Harshavardhan Reddy

Albert O. Juma thinks meeting Laureates will both be rewarding and challenging

Casey Schwarz expects to find the roots of her research

 

 

Beatrice Lugger

Beatrice Lugger is a science journalist and science social media specialist with a background as a chemist. She is Scientific Director of the National Institute for Science Communication, NaWik – nawik.de. @BLugger is her twitter handle, Quantensprung her own blog.