Given the amount of experiences connected to it, it is hard to separate the personal from the professional growth, the new friendships from the networking opportunities, but probably it is not needed to do that in this blog post.
Last summer I have been to NanoGUNE, in San Sebastiàn, from July until the beginning of October, a period chosen “for purely scientific reasons”, as I told everybody, though not expecting them to believe it. I suppose that the same scientific reasons have been driven also others SPEAR fellows, since at some point in the Basque town there was one of the highest concentration of ESRs ever observed.
Aside enjoying the several opportunities offered by the town, like the Jazz festival and the Film Festival, and visiting the many beauties of the Basque country, I have also been introduced to the world of 2D materials. The project I have been working at, though related to my main one, was in fact focused on this new class of materials, completely new to me. Everybody was very keen to help me on it, giving me tips on how to handle them correctly, and in the end I had my graphene flaked and devices to measure (picture attached).
To sum up, it has been an impressive enrichment opportunity, from several points of view, and really hard to forget.
