HELEN is approved !

Not all days start with a nice series of emails. Fortunately today is one of those!

The first one was a message announcing that the European Union has approved our HELEN project. Then followed a long series of congratulation emails, with statements like

"HELEN will boost the European - Latin American collaborations in HEP!"

HELEN stands for High-Energy Latin-European Network, It is a scientific cooperation agreement, signed by CERN, DESY, labs/universities from eight latin-american countries (Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, México, Perú y Venezuela), the four "latin-european" countries (Spain, France, Portugal, Italy) and other less latin ones (Greece, Sweden, UK).

HELEN is an alfa project. "She" will provide mobility and research grants, for students, technicians and physicists from Latin America to work on collaboration projects with the european labs. Her "father" is Juan Antonio Rubio, who was the CERN contact for Latin America (he is now the head of CIEMAT in Madrid), and its project leader is Luciano Maiani (the former CERN Director). Verónica Riquer, a CERN physicist from México is the project manager, and there are contact persons in each country.

I set up the french (IN2P3) contribution to HELEN. This was an interesting experience, although quite stressful. The EU requirements are very strict, and the deadlines are sharp. Moreover, the Europe/California time difference did not help me! Many days I had to be in my office  before 6 am, and I spent many hours on the phone, making sure we had collected all documents, stamps and the like. But we managed to have everything ready the day before the deadline!

The situation in Europe was not easy either: Verónica and Maiani had to deal with hundreds of files, make all necessary cross-checks, ask us for missing items, etc. Veronica spent weeks rushing non-stop from Geneva to Rome, and finally headed to Brussels on the last day, with the complete proposal!

Now comes the challenge of getting the best out of HELEN. We are already working on that, and the perspectives are very encouraging. I should start another thread with details :-)

For sure, there will soon be a nice http://helen.cern.ch page where interestged people can point to!

Comments

[Publicado por: judy]

This is great news! Congratulations!
Judy

[Publicado por: Kathy]

Hey congratulations -- I love the map, where is it available?

[Publicado por: Neil]

Jose
Great news. Congratulations to all.
N

[Publicado por: José]

Hi Kathy,

I googled something like "mapa america latina jpg" and chose this one among thousands. I may have lost track of the link.

[Publicado por: Ursula]

Hey Jose,
this goes is a great realisation of the collaborations and exchanges for the South American countries you wished for at the very beginning of the Quantum Diaries. Congratulations and good luck for all the collaborations that will come out of this program.

Ursula

[Publicado por: Sergio]

Hi I am an argentinian physic graduate working in HEP
I am so happy, thanks to this program I will be able to travel to CERN in Switzerland to continue my doctoral thesis. I tried to see the link http://helen.cern.ch without success...
Does anybody knows if it is the right adress?

[Publicado por: José]

Hola Sergio,

Be patient, as I said there is still no HELEN web page. We just got the approval letter from UE last friday, now there is a bunch of paperwork and organisation too be undertaken before the program starts.

Maria Teresa Dova is I think the contact person in your institution. She'll let you know for sure when we receive more info.

Btw, what are you working on?

Saludos,

[Publicado por: Sergio]

Thank you José, it is just anxiety. I am the student of Dova working on Monte Carlo simulations related to LHC.