LUMINET · European Network on Luminescent Materials

European Network on Luminescent Materials

The project web site is http://luminet.chem.uni.wroc.pl/. More details on the project, its development and achievements can be found there. Photo-documentation of the LUMINET seminars and meetings is also available there. Within the first 12 months of the project all but one of the planned ERs and ESRs were hired. The last ER, Peter Kopecky, was hired in the following year by OSRAM. Roughly in the middle of the project the Ruhr Unversitat Bochum resigned and decided to left the consortium, which became effective as of 30.11.2015. This was connected with the fact that prof. Anja Verena Mudring, who was coordinating LUMINET in Bochum, moved to US, where she was offered a position at University of Iowa. After the Kick off meeting in Wroclaw in the end of April 2013 the LUMINET consortium organized project meetings roughly every 6-8 months. Thus, we met in 1. Tenerife, 2. Augsburg, 3. Wroclaw, 4. Verona, 5. Tartu, 6. Aveiro, 7. Wroclaw. The meetings #3, 5 and 7 were organized as dependent, satellite events (just after) of International conferences: International Conference on Luminescence in Wroclaw – ICL 2014, Luminescent Detectors of Ionizing Radiation in Tartu – LUMDETR 2015 and Excited States of Transition Elements in Wroclaw-Polanica Zdroj – ESTE 2016. Such an approach was anticipated in our proposal and it worked fine. Combining the LUMINET consortium meetings with the International conferences allowed our ERs and ESRs to present their results not only within the consortium but to a much broader scientific community. Thus, at ICL there were ~600 participants, at LUMDETR above 200 and at ESTE about 110. All these conferences are cyclic events and proved to be valuable scientific meetings of high quality attended by top rank scientists. At each of the conferences our ERs and ESRs had oral and poster presentations. That was a great experience for our young researchers and a real verification of their achievements, posibility to present their results and discuss them with professionals. It was a great pleasure to see our young colleagues developing their knowledge, professional approach to the research as well as social skills from meeting to meeting. Their lectures at the scientific conferences were very well received and led to active discussions both within the consortium and with other scientist. On the other hand LUMINET meetings at the Partner's Universities were open for other young researchers, not involved in the LUMINET project, and altogether more than 30 such participants attended the seminars in Wroclaw, Verona, and Aveiro. Despite, at the LUMINET seminars eight high-rank professors not participating in the project (from Switzerland, France, Portugal, Germany, US, New Zealand) were invited and gave lectures on subjects they proposed. After each lecture a discussion took place. Some of them, especially from the more distant countries, stayed for the LUMINET meetings after the conferences harmonized in time as mentioned above. This made the use of money very much efficient. At the meetings in Tenerife and Augsburg a separate sections devoted to education and training of soft skills – group management, career management, leadership, patenting, patent-related low, intellectual property rights, innovation management, industrial environment protection, carrier opportunity in industry – were organized. This was very much appreciated by ERs and ESRs as well as by the Leaders of Partners, who were glad to attend these lectures/seminars/training too. At the end of the LUMINET project a few of the ESRs already defended their PhD theses. The others are scheduled to do it in 2017. Three out of four ERs already finished their research supported within LUMINET and quickly found their positions in industry. This proves that they were recognized by the market as highly-skilled and very well educated employees. We are not surprised, yet it is a direct proof that their training within LUMINET was efficient, novel, multidisciplinary and made them attractive for the companies active in the competitive high-tech industry market. Altogether the LUMINET project participants - ESRs, ERs, the Partner institutions Leaders – have a deep conviction that the support from the EU was efficiently used to educate future leaders in the R&D area of broadly understood subject of luminescence. They are highly flexible, open-minded and ambitious researchers. The cooperative and diverse training activities have provided new, relevant, sustainable technologies and the real-world, team-oriented, problem-solving experienced young researchers. They are able to understand and solve challenging scientific problems to benefit society. They acquired skills which are relevant both to the public and private sector, their employability is substantially enhanced.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union