[NF.15] Goodbye to FOM/FEN

This week I will slightly diverge from my plans, and give you some fresh update regarding my local initiative

Sad news

In May 2016 4 colleagues of mine and I founded Fusion Education Network ("Fuziona Obrazovna Mreža" in Serbian) to popularize nuclear fusion in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Last week our organization got dissolved as we did not have any activity in the last year and our lives are getting more complicated after finishing our PhDs.

What we did?

We tried to fill in the gap in the EUROfusion map:

Together we have achieved some impressive numbers: since the pilot project in autumn 2015, and successively in 2016 and 2017, 70 undergraduate students attended our workshops. They all have various backgrounds, in electrical engineering, physics, and physical chemistry.

Around 40 of those students have joined our FOM/junior program, expressing a desire to be continuously informed about fusion and mentored at the distance.

With a collaboration we had with the COMPASS team of IPP Prague, 7 students have spent two weeks each on a hands-on training at the COMPASS tokamak.

A few have attended more advanced plasma physics schools around Europe (in Greifswald, Lisbon, and Lausanne). One had her summer internship at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, and have decided to turn it into a master thesis project and direct her career towards fusion. One has enrolled in the plasma physics master program at the Comenius University, Bratislava.

And we will continue to follow the progress and offer our support to the younger ones as well.

Was it worth it?

It definitely was, and I would do it again back then. Now we all need to turn to new projects and adventures.

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Please feel free to ask anything in the comments. I will either try to answer you in the comment or even make the new post.