Twenty of South Africa’s top young scientists will attend the week-long 2019 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, which is dedicated to physics, later this year. This will be the sixty-ninth such meeting held at the city, in Bavaria, Germany.
South Africa has also been chosen as the “host country” for this year’s event. This will allow the country to showcase itself as a place of research on the meeting’s International Day.
“These scholars will serve as ambassadors for the country in the area of physics and at the International Day that S[outh] A[frica] is hosting,” highlighted Academy of Sciences of South Africa (ASSAf) executive officer Himla Soodyall. “They have an opportunity to engage with Nobel Laureates and other scholars in their field and I hope that the young scientists will take advantage of these interactions and use the opportunity to build networks for future collaborative research.”
Running from June 30 to July 5, the event will, in addition to the South Africans, involve 580 young scientists from 88 countries. The participants will include undergraduate, postgraduate and post doctoral students, who are under 35 years old.
There will also be 42 Nobel laureates participating. The meeting will involve a series of lectures and panel discussions. The main topics will be cosmology, gravitational waves and laser physics.
The 20 young South Africans, ten men and ten women, were nominated by ASSAf. They come from all across the country and were chosen through an international, multi-stage process. They will get chances to present their research through poster sessions or even at one or other of the master classes.