More than 50 European researchers attended the PROMIS Summer School which was hosted recently by the University of Montpellier. It brought together our partner supervisors and researchers from across academia and industry as well as a number of non-PROMIS graduate students and high profile speakers.

Two inspirational talks were given by distinguished scientist Professor Manijeh Razeghi - Director of the Centre for Quantum Devices at Northwestern University (USA). Her energy and enthusiasm clearly stimulated the audience and especially the students. Other high profile invited speakers included Prof. Diana Huffaker from Cardiff University (UK), Prof. Ivan Garcia, Instituto de Energía Solar, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain), Prof. Christian Seassal, Director of Institute of Nanotechnologies, Lyon and Prof. Sergei Novikov, Nottingham University (UK). These presentations along with others provided excellent insight for our early stage researchers in related areas of photonics.

This international training network (ITN), funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie action of the European Horizon 2020 program, aims to train 16 postgraduate researchers in a full range of multidisciplinary skills needed by the rapidly expanding Photonics industry. The PROMIS Summer School was successfully integrated with the MBE16 conference which was also held in Montpellier and was attended by over 400 delegates from academia and industry. The University of Montpellier is a member of the PROMIS ITN and local arrangements for both PROMIS and MBE 2016 were very professionally coordinated by Professor Thierry Taliercio and Professor Eric Tournié.

The Summer School also provided soft skills and gave our researchers the opportunity engage in training sessions on “How to manage a project” and “How to create a webcast”. These interactive sessions will be taken forward by the researchers and developed to support outreach events for the PROMIS network. Additionally the researchers created a poster for the MBE Conference PROMIS sponsored poster session. Prizes were given to the top 3 posters.

Professor Anthony Krier, PROMIS Project Coordinator said:

"The Summer school in Montpellier was a great experience for everyone. Our early stage researchers were very enthusiastic and the standard of the poster presentations was very high. It was a real pleasure to reward the winners with a certificate and a small cash prize."

Professor Thierry Taliercio/Eric Tournié, PROMIS Supervisor and workshop host said:

"It was a real pleasure to organize the PROMIS summer school in Montpellier. The oral presentations were of very high quality. In addition to the early stage researchers, the summer school gave to master students of the University of Montpellier the rare opportunity to meet distinguished scientists pursuing frontier research."

The next PROMIS workshop will be held in Rome, June 2017.

Fri 07 October 2016