oPAC Fellows leave the Nest
Their projects may have finished but the oPAC Fellows haven’t been idle. Xiangcheng Chen has been the first Fellow to obtain a PhD as a result of his work in oPAC. The thesis, entitled "Non-interceptive position detection for short-lived radioactive nuclei in heavy-ion storage rings" was successfully defended in November at Heidelberg University and was praised by the examiners for its excellent quality. The now Dr. Chen has subsequently got a postdoc position in the Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Lanzhou, where he continues his research on heavy ion storage rings in close collaboration with GSI and RIKEN.
Xiangcheng’s academic achievements will hopefully be soon emulated by Emilia Cruz. She has just submitted her PhD thesis and expects to defend it at the University of Liverpool in March. Not wanting to wait a minute to leave the nest she has flown to Oxford where she is now working at the John Adams Institute for the EuroCircCol project, designing the interaction regions of the Future Circular Collider.
Pavel Maslov has started working at the Faculty of Computer Science and Informatics of the University of Ljubljana at the Laboratory for Integration of Information Systems, where he is in charge of two H2020 projects – AgroIT and Flexiciency.
Finally Blaine Lomberg went back to his native South Africa where he is working as a Junior Lecturer at the University of the Western Cape. He is also collaborating with the National Accelerator Laboratory called iThemba LABS working on the development of a new Radioactive Ion Beam (RIB) Facility in South Africa.
To all of them, congratulations and the bet of lucks in your new endeavours!