Event Summary - The 15th Nordic Workshop on Scattering from Soft Matter
The 15th Nordic Workshop on Scattering from Soft Matter was held in Lund, Sweden on January 17th to 18th, 2018, as a lunch-to-lunch meeting, jointly organised by ESS, MAX IV, LINXS and Lund University. This is an annual event that gathers researchers from the Nordic countries as well as Europe. The meeting was very well attended with just over 100 participants, who had the possibility to listen to many interesting talks with a focus on the dynamical and structural properties of soft matter.
After a welcome by Dr Marie Skepo, Division of Theoretical Chemistry, Lund, the meeting started off with an overview of LINXS by Professor Peter Schurtenberger, Director of Lund institute of advanced neutron and X-ray science, and before the poster session the audience were given beamline updates from MAX IV laboratory as well as ESS.
Four keynote speakers were invited to meeting, and during the first day Prof. Dr. Christian Gutt, from University of Siegen, Germany, talked about” Low radiation dose XPCS for dynamics in soft matter and biological materials” and Dr. Felix Roosen-Runge, Physical Chemistry, LU, Sweden gave a talk entitled” Dynamics of proteins in solution studied by quasi-elastic neutrons scattering”.
During the second day of the meeting we had the pleasure to listen to Dr. Hanna Isaksson, Biomedical Engineering, LU, Sweden, who presented how ”Scattering methods can unravel nanostructural changes in musculoskeletal tissues under loading””, whereas the last session started off with the keynote speaker Prof. Jan Skov Pedersen, Department of Chemistry and Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center (iNANO), Aarhus University, Denmark who discussed ”Refolding of SDS-unfolded proteins by non-ionic surfactants: Equilibrium and kinetics”.
One of the aims of the meeting is to give young researchers the opportunity to present their research.
In total there were 12 student talks and 3 scientific presentations by the sponsoring companies. After the poster session, a much appreciated three-course dinner was served at Hypoteket. Professor Kell Mortensen, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, wrapped up the meeting congratulating many of the young researchers on the quality of their science and their presentations. He also welcomed everyone to the next Nordic Soft Matter and Scattering Meeting in Århus, Denmark, 2019.
To conclude, both the NSSM workshop as well as the workshop on the use of computer simulations were very successful. The organizing committee also gratefully acknowledges support from the main sponsors LINXS, and NordForsk, as well as from the cooperate sponsors Xenocs, excillium, and Anton Paar.
Thank you all for a very interesting event!
Marie Skepö (Lund University, SE), Andrew Jackson (Lund University; ESS, SE), Ann Terry (MAX IV Laboratory, SE), Peter Schurtenberger (Lund University and LINXS, SE), Reidar Lund (University of Oslo, NO), and Zsuzsa Helyes (ESS, SE).
Key statistics:
Total attendance: 107 of which 39 were women.
Total number of speakers: 19 of which 7 were women.
There were 4 session chairs, of which 2 were female.