Engaging with Diamond Light Source

 

In total our events welcomed 5,635 visitors to the facility, comprising; 1,413 for scientific and technical events, 668 undergraduate and postgraduate visitors, 3,121 school students and members of the general public, and 433 VIPs and stakeholders.

 

The majority of our visitors come for Diamond’s core program of events, including our regular Inside Diamond open day, which continues to be extremely popular and gives members of the public a chance to visit the facility in small groups, to see inside the synchrotron and visit a beamline.

 

 

In July we hosted a new family focused event 'Meet the Scientist', where over 20 Diamond staff and members of our user groups came with a raft of interactive exhibits to showcase their work to a younger audience. Over 600 visitors attended over the day to participate in activities that included levitating trains, lifting weights with vacuums and building viruses as well as taking tours inside the synchrotron building.

 

 

 

We have offered regular schools open days, giving A-level students a general overview of the facility and highlighting career opportunities available to them. There are also dedicated activities for students to experience specialist areas within the facility including biology, computing, engineering and science applications. The Diamond schools work experience program continues to develop taking its third cohort in 2017, offering 28 students an immersive week of project based work in areas across the organisation.

 

Away from site, Diamond has also been active promoting our work. In September we partnered with Harwell Campus and the Medical Research Council to host a stand at the New Scientist Exhibition at the ExCel Centre in in London, with over 30,000 people attending the four day event. The Bluedot music festival at Jodrell Bank Observatory, where music is combined with a programme of live science and expert talks, provided the opportunity to engage with a different audience. Thousands of festival goers were able to visit our exhibition stand and talk to some of Diamond’s summer placement students.

 

Diamond continues to work closely with the engagement team at STFC, jointly delivering a series of activities, including the school’s Particle Physics Masterclasses and public Stargazing events which between them welcome over 1,200 visitors to site every year.

 

Over the past 15 years of operation, Diamond’s staff numbers have continued to grow and so the past year has seen a targeted increase in internal engagement activities. As well as talks and training, an internal science open day took place in November, where 20 beamlines opened their doors and welcomed 160 staff from across the facility to learn more about the operations and science delivered within.

Our work placement schemes for undergraduates continued to provide students with in-depth research projects whilst also developing life-long skills in communication, engagement and project management. In June 2017, six Year in Industry and 14 summer placement students arrived at Diamond to begin their projects. Whilst based at Diamond, the students also had opportunities to visit other research teams and facilities on-site and to present their research to the wider Diamond organisation.

 

Diamond welcomed 25 new PhD students in 2017, bringing the total number of co-funded PhD studentships to over 90 active students. We proudly collaborate with research organisations around the UK and beyond, hosting co-funded PhD students and training the synchrotron scientists of the future. Continuing from the successful introduction of a centralised call for collaborative PhD proposals in 2016, the 2017 scheme received 59 proposals. Following an internal review process, 16 studentships were funded and we look forward to welcoming our new students starting in October 2018.

 

The demand for visits from the university student community continues to increase and Diamond met this by hosting 26 postgraduate and undergraduate groups from across the country in 2017. 

Diamond hosted a range targeted events to meet the interests and development needs of our staff and user community. A summary of these events is outlined herein, which includes workshops, conferences and training schools relating to specialist fields, techniques and software that can further research and discoveries in Synchrotron Science.

 

During the summer months, Diamond hosted three international conferences, each from an established conference series. The 20th International Magnetic Measurement Workshop (IMMW20) was held onsite in June 2017 with a whole week of presentations and open discussions on the equipment and techniques used to measure and characterise magnetic fields on accelerator magnets and insertion devices. In August, we welcomed experts in the field of X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy to discuss aspects of the technique that affect data quality in XAFS experiments at Q2XAFS, a satellite workshop the IUCr Congress meeting. We ended the summer with the ninth International Workshop on Infrared Microscopy and Spectroscopy with Accelerator Based Sources (WIRMS 2017) at Worcester College in Oxford, a key meeting for staff and users of IR/THz beamlines at Synchrotrons (SR), Energy Recovery Linac (ERL) and Free Electron Laser (FEL) facilities around the globe.