Yesterday, it was the annual meeting of the Belgian Physical Society, a nice event where Belgian physicists come together to present their latest work. It also provides a good opportunity for junior scientist to present their work (e.g. through the young speaker contest, an event I won in 2011).
The three students competing for the young speaker award presented three very interesting topics going from the creation of Aharonov-Bohm cages over the observation of high energy cosmic rays with detectors of several thousand square kilometers to the temperature determination of clusters. This years young speaker award went very deservedly to Daniela Mockler for her work on the measurement of cosmic rays.
Before lunch there was the usual conference picture (can you spot me? 😎 )
After our lunch there was the poster session. This year, I decided only to present a poster of my work on vibrational spectra. It combined work on Eu defects in diamond, the vibrational spectrum of Lactose and water and a method for fingerprinting defects in diamond.
During the parallel sessions, I attended the parallel session on physics education. Domien Van der Elst highlighted the daunting task of dealing with a serious shortage in Physics and Mathematics teachers. He suggest the creation of an online platform to (replace/)supplement physics teachers. Despite the possible benefits (and the fact that some big companies are looking into similar setups) I remain skeptical. My main worry being GDPR (privacy) wise and the growing trend that software users are more and more considered as sources providing data and private information to mine and use for a companies benefit (not the software user). The second talk by Bart Huyskens was very inspiring. From his practical experience as a high school teacher, he develops, together with a colleague, hardware, software and courseware for STEM projects. And when he says STEM projects he means it: projects containing ALL parts of a STEM education. Hearing him talk, it is not hard to start dreaming up possible projects, both short and long term. The third and final presentation of the session was by Phillipe Leonard on the concept of “Challenge Labs“. During these labs, teams of students get a “simple problem” to solve. However, while trying to solve the the problem, they discover nothing is what it seems, and they need to learn to think outside the box. This definitely is an interesting method of teaching (assuming good support by the teacher involved) which has the possibility to lift students to a higher level.
After the coffee break, I attended the remainder of the condensed matter session. During this session Michael Sluydts presented his Machine-Learning work on dopants in Si and Ge. An approach which should be very suitable for diamond as well.
All in all a very interesting day.
