For the past month and a bit, I have been incredibly fortunate to get to attend the 2024 Hercules Synchrotron School in Grenobles, France. Hercules is a 5-week course primarily hosted by the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) and the Université Grenoble Alpes, with students spending one of the five weeks at a partner facility elsewhere in Europe. The school covers anything and everything to do with X-ray and neutron generation and scattering, as well as the techniques available at synchrotron, neutron, and free-electron laser facilities.
I arrived in Grenoble on a wet Sunday afternoon after a long trip (car, train, bus, plane, plane, bus, tram), and the school kicked off straight away the next morning at half past eight. Exhaustion levels only increased from there! The programme was incredible, in terms of content, in terms of volume, but above all in terms of the people involved. The lectures were held by some of the top scientists in their field, with many travelling to Grenoble only for the day.
Apart from the lecture programme there was also the hiking and skiing and partying... To all you who know who you are, thanks for all the awesome memories! <3
I'd like to especially thank the team at the Institute for Photon Science and Synchrotron Radiation at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) (Olaf and Angelica, you are the best!) for hosting a few of us for a week. We spent it learning all about how they use high-throughput imaging to analyse thousands of model organisms, in order to learn about how genetic variations affect specific morphology. They do so much imaging, they need to queue up the reconstructions to do them over the quiet Christmas period!
I would like to sincerely thank the IMPACT programme for their support for this trip. It was a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and not something I will ever forget.