Author: Paolo Sgarro

Third training and visit to Gothenburg

Waiting for my secondment, I can affirm that, so far, one of the nicest parts of the SPEAR project are the training sessions held periodically in one of the partner institutions. Last week, I met with all the other ESRs in Gothenburg. We had the chance to assist to precious talks on unconventional computing, a topic that has always attracted my interest and from which I could also find some hints for my project. It has also been particularly stimulating to hear from professor Akerman about the story of his startup, Nanoosc, since the real world of startup is sometimes fascinating but obscure to most of us. For the first time, also all the PIs were presents. This gave us the opportunity to present our work to a specific audience, and we could receive interesting and original feeedbacks. The weather has not helped the visiting experience, but  on the last afternoon, we could give a look to this nice town and enjoy some time together. After one year, we start to know each other better and these events are getting better also on a personal level

ISAF conference

In the end of June I had the chance to present a poster at the ISAF conference, in Tours, to which I participated together with my supervisor and with a colleague. It was my first in-person conference, the poster was about a theoretical work I started during my internship and that I resumed at the beginning of my PhD. Together with my group, we are working at the implementation of a novel technology, that exploits the ferroelectric control of spin-charge conversion, what I presented was the development of a compact analytical model of the device.

ISAF conference is organized by IEEE and stands for International Symposium on Applications of Ferroelectrics. The research direction of my group has recently been approaching ferroelectricity and what we were bringing, though related to it, was slightly different from the majority of the topics explored there. I had the chance to learn about a lot of subjects and open questions I knew almost nothing about; on the other side I had to explain the basic concepts of spintronics to the people coming for the poster, which I believe has been a useful exercise.

Outside the stunning Da Vinci conference center, we met with some other scientists in a more informal environment and we could also appreciate the social life of a nice town like Tours.

Overall, it has been a very valuable experience.

“Hello again Grenoble” and the first training

I arrived in Grenoble for the first time last year, in march, ready to start an internship in Spintec. In that moment, the town was nearly paralyzed for the restriction imposed by the pandemic.
One year later, I was back in Grenoble. I started my PhD two month ago. I had the chance to meet again my colleagues, I fastly got updated on the progress that were made during my absence and picked up the work I left last september.
The town I found had totally recovered from the long restrictions and, being winter, I could enjoy and take full advantage of the surroundings of Grenoble. For example, together with getting trained on new softwares and on the experimental equipment, I could also benefit of a nice introduction to skiing.
Last month, we hosted in Grenoble the first Training for the SPEAR project. It was a surprising experience. It was a real pleasure to get to know in person the other guys participating to the projects. Both the the soft skills classrooms and the dinners contributed to create a nice synergy (or fellowhip, as someone mentioed). Moreover, we had the honor to assist to many inspiring lessons given by renowned scientists.

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