Group of experts is to issue a report on global research infrastructures

      The "Group of Senior Officials" (GSO) provides competent advice to the Science Ministers of the G7 nations. Their report on global research infrastructures is to be published this year.

     Research nowadays is taking place not only at individual university laboratories and institutes or other research establishments: in many areas, research outcome requires the involvement of multinational or even global institutions. In basic scientific research, these one-of-a-kind centres include CERN in Geneva with its Large Hadron Collider (LHC), or the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser Facility (XFEL) which is being built in Hamburg. There are critical global infrastructure institutions in other areas, too, for example for the collection of biological samples or social science data. Research infrastructures located at more than one site are becoming increasingly important in light of issues of global relevance such as poverty-related diseases or marine pollution whose solution will require joint international effort. These infrastructures collect data for which large data infrastructures are being developed and whose maintenance and processing require appropriate multinational input.

The joint efforts to build European or international research infrastructures are helping countries to make use of the synergies of a globalized world and the greater mobility of knowledge and researchers. The Group of Senior Officials (GSO) was formed after the first meeting of the G8 Science Ministers in Okinawa in 2008 to enable the exchange of information about planned new research infrastructure of global relevance and to provide competent advice to national science ministries. The members of the group are experts with experience in research infrastructures who engage in regular exchange. The group's mandate was renewed at the G8 Science Ministers meeting in the United Kingdom in 2013. The GSO is now a global forum for the planning and networking as well as further development of global research infrastructures – akin to the ESFRI Forum at the purely European level.

The GSO will issue a progress report on its work in 2015.

A visit of a delegation of the German Embassy to the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna

   A delegation of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Russia headed by Director of the Economics and Science Department Mr. Wolfgang Dik visited the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research on 4 February 2015.
The programme of the visit included several meetings and excursions to the JINR basic facilities. The guests visited cyclotrons of the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions and the MASHA facility; they were acquainted with one of the IBR-2 channels, where scientists from Germany are working, as well as with environmental research of the Laboratory of Neutron Physics. In the Laboratory for High Energy Physics, they visited the factory of superconducting magnets, the detector laboratories for the NICA accelerator complex.

Read more: A visit of a delegation of the German Embassy