Update from LINXS Director Trevor Forsyth
LINXS Director Trevor Forsyth. Photo Johan Persson.
LINXS is pleased to have announced three new research Themes that will start in early 2027: Functional Proteins for the Future (FunProF), led by Petri Kursula (Bergen, Norway); Accessible Computational Scattering Tools (CATS), led by Mikael Lund (Lund, Sweden); and Generating Advances with AI for neutrons/X-rays (GAIN), led by Pablo Villanueva Perez (Lund, Sweden). They will all describe their plans at our Digital Town Hall on 26 October. The Town Hall meeting is deliberately kept short and exclusively online to enhance wide and international participation. It is a good meeting for anyone thinking about submitting an application for the next LINXS National and International Theme Call (to be announced in the coming weeks).
The current Themes are very active and organising numerous events over a wide range of science. The LINXS community is making increasing use of the data analysis workstations funded by the Crafoord Foundation. Please remember that you are welcome to work at LINXS before or after experimental sessions, and do not hesitate to contact us if you think you can benefit from these powerful workstations.
We are very pleased to announce the appointment of two new external experts to our Scientific Advisory Board (SAB): Victoria Garcia Sakai, who is a Division Head at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source in the UK, and Teresa Carlomagno, Professor of Integrative Structural Biology at the University of Birmingham, UK. They will provide expertise on the SAB for the areas of Soft Matter and Life Sciences, respectively. We extend a warm welcome to them and thank them for taking on this task.
We are very grateful to our two departing SAB members, Annette Langkilde (Copenhagen) and Jan Skov Pedersen (Aarhus), for their dedication and time as SAB members over the past years. It is extremely important for LINXS to have impartial external assessment of our work, and both Annette and Jan played invaluable roles.
Next year will be the 10th birthday of LINXS, and we intend to mark this with a special conference on 2-3 June 2027. Please note the date in your diary. The agenda is currently being planned and a draft will be circulated shortly. It will also be an important year for Science Village as a whole, with MAX IV undergoing major development, the ESS set to start operating, and a continuous ramp-up of the national and international user communities. Lund University’s plans for a nanoscience centre have reached an advanced stage, and there have also been extended discussions about the relocation of specific departments (or parts thereof) to Brunnshög (see the recent Vice Chancellor’s blog). LINXS, with its powerful collaborative base, is well positioned to facilitate these developments.
We are also pleased to share our Annual Report 2025 Highlights, which describes some of the major developments that occurred at LINXS during this period, in addition to a great deal of more detailed information.