The engagement of the students was second to none – Infranaut Week a resounding success!

28 master and bachelor students from all over the country joined the event, which was organised by ARI4Sweden in collaboration with Lund University, MAX IV and ESS.

Nils Skoglund was very impressed with the engagement of the students.

Infranaut Week was ARI4Sweden’s first major event targeted at students at master- and bachelor level. Comprising four days of lectures, facility tours and discussions at Science Village in Lund, it aimed to connect students to large scale research facilities such as MAX IV, and ESS, and create networking opportunities with academia, industry and infrastructure specialists.

28 master and bachelor students from all over the country joined the event, which was organised by ARI4Sweden in collaboration with Lund University, MAX IV and ESS.

Nils Skoglund, Associate professor at Department of Applied Physics and Electronics at Umeå University, was one of the organisers. During the week, he presented his own path to using advanced research infrastructures, especially synchrotrons,, and also moderated scientific sessions.

– What struck me most was how engaged and interested the students were! Parts of the format were like scientific conferences with a lot of new information in presentations and sessions all day long which is quite demanding, despite that, the students showed curiosity the whole time.

– We tried to keep a broad spectrum of content from many disciplines and sectors with a mix of academia and industrial involvement. This approach got very good feedback so we will continue on that track in the upcoming Infranauts weeks!

Eskil Andreasson, technology specialist at Tetra Pak, who was also involved in the week, agrees:

– It was fantastic to see such engaged students. Some of them even requested material before the week started.

Eskil Andreasson highlights how the mix of old and young participants during the Infranaut Week created a really great atmosphere.

Personally, he was extra glad to see a large turnout from students from Chalmers University of Technology, since he had collaborated with many of them before during their studies. Within the framework for that collaboration, some students made a script and ”manual” to explain the process extraction, and also analysed data acquired from the beamline ForMAX at MAX IV. This work aimed to simplify the visualisation and handling of experimental results. They were able to create the script solely on data which Eskil Andreasson had retrieved from experiments at ForMAX.

– For these students to come here and get to see the beamline and meet the beamline scientists, meant a lot. Their work also shows that you can do a lot of valuable development without physically being at the facilities.

He commends the mix of students, industry representatives and academics who gathered for Infranaut Week.

– Mixing old and young people with different levels of skills and knowledge create a really good, collaborative learning environment.

Important to increase awareness about the possibilities

Nils Skoglund highlights how interdisciplinary events like these are crucial for reaching out to the students with knowledge of what you can do with X-rays and neutron techniques. These students will later go on to pursue research or industrial careers where this knowledge is key.

– In the triple helix that is industry – academia – advanced research infrastructure (ARI), I represent academia and see a clear need to reach out to students about the possibilities that exist.

– If we do not educate students, doctors, or post-docs, they will not take these questions with them to future workplaces in industry. Competence and capacity to use ARI – from laboratories to large-scale research infrastructure – are crucial to maintaining Sweden's leadership in innovation, for which we are nevertheless known internationally.

He adds:

– Events like these can work like eye-openers in understanding how different analytical approaches to advanced research infrastructures can be used within their own field early in the students’ careers, as in this case, already in undergraduate education. It opens doors and avenues of thought that would otherwise come much later, if they even happened.

Reflecting on future initiatives he would like to see, he says:

– We see a clear need for ARI4Sweden to reduce the silo thinking when it comes to how ARI is used by industry and academia together. Previous efforts have often revolved around experiments at facilities in project form, but we have seen that the big steps for Sweden as a knowledge and innovation nation can be taken when the focus is on building competence and capacity for the use of ARI.

– With more competent users in both academia and industry, we will have more effective use and faster implementation of results in practical applications. Here, a long-term approach is needed that provides the conditions at a national level for ARI and academia to simplify the paths of collaboration with industry, where competence development is precisely the first step towards building broad capacity.

Positive feedback from the students

The students who participated in Infranaut week were overwhelmingly positive. Two of them were Mehwish Idrees, a master student at Lund University in Synthetic and Analytical Chemistry and Madeleine Liljestrand, who is studying for a BA in chemistry with focus on pharmaceutical analysis at Karlstad University. Madeline has done her thesis together with AstraZeneca, on the MRNA encapsulation in lipid nanoparticles.

They both highlight the diverse lectures and perspectives as key features of the week. They were also surprised to hear that MAX IV allocates beamtime solely for students, something none of them knew before. They also mention how beneficial it was to learn how to write a beamline application, which they are both interested in testing for future thesis work. Learning how to apply beamline techniques to many different scientific fields was another important take away!

Mehwish Idrees (left) and Madeleine Liljestrand (right) were very happy with Infranaut Week, and especially commend the diversity of the presentations and the introduction of the new techniques.