The CREMLINplus Kick-off meeting
The CREMLINplus (Connecting Russian and European Measures for Large-scale Research Infrastructures – plus) is a project within the EU Framework programme “Horizon 2020” (Grant 871072, website: https://www.cremlinplus.eu/).
This project is a continuation of CREMLIN project (duration 2015-2018, https://www.cremlin.eu/).
The coordinator of both projects is DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron).
The main goal of the CREMLINplus project is fostering European-Russian scientific and technical collaboration in the field of research infrastructures. Advancing specific infrastructure projects in close European-Russian collaboration, exploring access mechanisms to Russian research infrastructures for international utilisation as well as knowledge exchange are at the core of CREMLINplus.
The CREMLINplus kick-off meeting was conducted on the 19-20 February 2020 at DESY in Hamburg. All 35 CREMLINplus project partners were represented at the kick-off workshop. The workshop was attended by almost 100 European and Russian participants from Russia, Germany, France, Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria.
The aim of the kick-off meeting was to present and explain the overall work plan and structure of the project as well as to clarify roles and align expectations. In a welcome speech, DESY’s Director of Administration, Christian Harringa, highlighted the importance of the project and pointed to its role in science diplomacy. In a series of introductory statements both the European Commission´s and the Russian perspectives on the project were presented. Further, the governance structure of the project, the internal and external communication structure as well as financial regulations and reporting under Horizon 2020 were explained.
The EU-Russian megascience scientific-technical collaboration plans including status reports on 5 Russian megascience projects as well as the EU-Russian non- technical collaboration plans around LIST-11 facilities and megascience projects were presented. The non-technical collaboration in the project comprises a variety of coordination and support activities, carried out within WP8 “Access to Russian RI”, WP9 “Staff exchange and training for RI management”, WP10 “Joint long-term sustainability of RI”.
There were parallel working sessions for work packages 2-10 to discuss current issues such as WP kick-offs, work plans, tasks, roles, timelines etc. followed by a plenary session dedicated to highlighting the interaction within CREMLINplus among technical and non-technical work packages. For each technical WP – these are WP2 NICA, WP3 PIK, WP4 USSR, WP5 SCT, WP6 XCELS, WP7 DETEC – one delegate was nominated to take care of the interface to the non-technical activities in the project.
Materials from the kick-off meeting, including the agenda as well as available slides from the talks, can be found on https://indico.desy.de/indico/event/24963/material/slides/
The source of information: CREMLINplus website https://www.cremlinplus.eu/events/
