Some 80 scientists from the region and beyond are meeting at SESAME on 30 November and 1 December to discuss the scientific programme and latest results from the laboratory. For the first time, the Users’ meeting is being held on the SESAME campus in a new guest house and meeting facility. Another first this year is that the meeting is being held jointly with the European Synchrotron and FEL User Organisation, ESUO, a sign of SESAME’s growing integration into the international research landscape.
The programme opened with a welcome from the Laboratory’s Director, Khaled Toukan, and an update on the SESAME scientific programme and beamlines. It continued with presentations of results from experiments conducted at SESAME. There were also presentations from representatives of European light sources, as well as from the OPEN SESAME consortium, an EU funded project that has provided training support since 2017 and concludes this year, the BEATS consortium, another EU funded project building a tomography beamline at SESAME, and from HESEB, a SESAME-Helmholtz collaboration for the installation of a new soft X-ray beamline.
The Users meeting was also the occasion to wish farewell to outgoing Research Director, Giorgio Paolucci, who is taking up a new appointment at the Elettra light source in Trieste, Italy, after a six-year stint at SESAME.
