Institute day by day

Youth report: pace, prospects, areas

Every year, the Association of Young Scientists and Specialists of JINR sums up the results of the year at a general meeting. This version of the report on the work over the past 2.5 years is an attempt to consolidate on paper the results achieved that will become a starting point for new indicators, formats and activities.

Today, AYSS unites 1180 employees of the Institute under 36 years of age. However, the events organized by AYSS affect not only young people and not only employees of the Institute.

Every year, AYSS:
- organizes and holds scientific conferences and schools;
- informs about upcoming scientific conferences and schools;
- promotes the socialization of new employees and develops horizontal links at the laboratory and interlaboratory levels;
- involves young employees in participating in lectures, excursions and festivals and is engaged in popularization of science and the achievements of JINR;
- organizes social, sports and cultural events;
- is engaged in volunteering;
- holds competitions for JINR youth grants and awards;
- is engaged in the promotion of youth initiatives.

The first thing that was done 2.5 years ago was to strengthen the ties between the members of the Association, to identify active and interested participants. It required reliable information support and convenient techniques of prompt communication. It was obvious that the mailing list needed to be updated, it was necessary to attract new employees and to carry out a small information campaign explaining the goals and importance of this mailing. Further increase of our basic means of prompt communication - the Telegram channel was also important.

As a result of the information work carried out, the number of subscribers to the mailing list has doubled and today, it amounts to 1.200 recipients and the audience of the AYSS Telegram channel has grown 3.5 times, reaching 670 people. For those having not yet joined the mailing list, we remind you: to subscribe, you need to send your data to ayss@jinr.ru: full name, name of the department, laboratory and desire to join the mailing list. You can connect to the Telegram channel by clicking on the link: https://t.me/ayssjinr. By the end of 2024, the reconstruction of the AYSS website will be completed.

After the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a need to restart all suspended activities, especially mass events. It was important to come up with new formats that would facilitate regular, useful and interesting acquaintance of employees with each other. This is how the idea of holding AYSS seminars in the Scientists' Club was born.

The third season of these seminars will start in September. If you want to give a talk in a format where the employees explain complex scientific topics in an accessible language, write to ayss@jinr.ru, we will definitely include you in the schedule. The format has become popular among the citizens of Dubna: the latter can attend the seminars by registering with the link on the event poster.

The second significant activity for our Association was the launch of the JINR Film Club that later received a new area - the Film Union. This initiative is also available to the citizens of Dubna - you can watch famous world masterpieces and classics of cinema, meet people that are close to you in spirit, since after the screening there is a discussion of what was seen. The ideological inspirers of this format were Maxim Gromov and Alexander Madumarov, graduates of Moscow State University that brought this tradition to JINR from their university.

To finish the "Club" story, it is worth noting that with the support and active engagement of the members of the JINR AYSS, there are many clubs today: skiing, art, dance, kendo, German and English, the JINR dissertation club and others. In the near future, we are going to open a board game club, since we have quite a few such enthusiasts. Follow the news in our Telegram channel.

Each club has its own story to tell and you could already read about many of them on the pages of the JINR weekly. Together with the newspaper staff, we have created the "Personal dimension" column, where anyone can tell about his or her path to science, about the work at JINR. Thanks to these articles, we have learned a lot about the work of the departments, the cooperation of divisions with universities and schools.

The Back to Office format - an outdoor event for AYSS members and their families that is held outdoors in Ratmino has been relaunched. This event, like a traditional school essay, could be called "How I spent my summer": the children gather after their vacations, share their impressions and plans for the coming year and sometimes, discuss upcoming and current joint projects.

In addition to the traditional International Scientific Conferences "Alushta", AYSS and the Summer School for Young Scientists and Specialists "Lipnya", the International School of Accelerator Physics was added. The history of its establishment begins with the initiative of Mikhail Shandov. As a member of the AYSS Council, he proposed to organize an engineering school with the involvement of specialists in accelerator physics in order to prepare personnel for work at the NICA complex in advance. This year, the School is held for the second time. Dmitry Pugachev (FLNR) decided to take on the organization of the school and it is dedicated to cyclotrons. Most likely, next year, the organizers will be young employees of DLNP. In the future, the topics of the schools will be dedicated to individual systems: cryogenic, vacuum, magnetic, experiments on accelerators, data processing.

Holding such events helps to attract new staff. I will give a small example - thanks to last year's AYSS conference, a new employee from among the conference participants came to the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, two more future employees currently finish their master's theses under the supervision of LTP employees. Other conference participants established contacts and met future supervisors. It is worth noting that young employees increasingly take on the supervision of student practices and cooperate with the University Centre that significantly enriches the Institute.

It is important to note that the events organized by AYSS extend beyond the Institute. We invite young specialists from other organizations, such as "Tenzor", "Atol" and the Special Economic Zone "Dubna". This format is useful and convenient for it gives the opportunity to learn not only the news of fundamental science, but also to see how diverse and rich Dubna is.

As for youth initiatives, we will touch on the main ones. At the moment, DLNP, FLNP and VBLHEP have bicycles that can be used to travel around the site to distant buildings. Next year, we will try to achieve the purchase of a dozen for LRB employees. It is also worth adding about the completion of work to transform the "people's path" into a convenient, asphalt path. The alley starts from DLNP and leads through the forest to the distant buildings of LRB and DRS. It is funny that some employees call it the "AYSS Alley". Together with the UC and the Department of International Cooperation, AYSS activists are going to transform Russian language courses for foreign specialists, making them more qualitative and useful and also to launch a similar conversation club. The driving force behind this idea was Madalina Miloe. All these examples clearly show that in addition to meeting these issues, AYSS has become a mechanism for delivering information vertically. We would like to thank JINR Directorate and Directorate of each laboratory, the UC, PCDD, SIM Office, HRCM Office, the Administration of the Scientists' Club and of the Cultural Center "Mir" for their assistance in this regard.

For the last six months, young employees have been involved in developing a detector database - a resource that will allow not only to find the owner of the required facility or supplier of a certain consumable, but also carriers of unique competencies. As a result, this mechanism can be used to quickly find and organize a team for a specific project or activity not only within the Institute, but also outside it. If any of the readers is interested in this matter, I will be glad to include him or her in the team, write, please, to the same email address ayss@jinr.ru.

In addition to working in AYSS, our representatives extensively participate in the activities of the Council of Young Scientists of the Moscow Region (CYS MR). This is another mechanism of communication between young employees of research institutes and universities of the Moscow Region. The work of the Council is supervised by the Ministry of Industry, Science and Innovation of the Moscow Region that in turn, organizes competitions for the Moscow Region Governor's Prize and social mortgage. The dialogue between CYS MR and AYSS largely helps to promptly receive information and to resolve issues related to registration that in turn reduces the percentage of rejected documents and improves the quality of submitted applications.

Since 2023, JINR has been represented in the Coordination Council for Youth Affairs in Science and Education of the Presidential Council for Science and Education of the Russian Federation. Work in the council is interesting and important and deserves a separate publication. In short, this is popular science tourism, international cooperation, scientific volunteering, organizing a congress of young scientists and participating in the congress of young scientists in Sochi... If you want to join, follow the news, write, please, to the already known address. Participation in these events is a great opportunity to meet colleagues from leading research institutes and universities. If you have an idea, you want to do an inter-institute project or need students to participate, such cooperation will be indispensable. AYSS is already familiar with SMU and SNS TPU, TSU, FEFU, PNU, MEPhI, MISiS, MSU, MIPT, RIAH, IBRAE, INP. If you need contacts or information, you already know what to do.

It should be noted that AYSS members are represented in the youth departments of the Russian Pugwash Committee, the International Association of Academies of Sciences and the Youth Council of the National Centre for Physics and Mathematics.

To sum it up, we can say that AYSS is known far beyond Dubna. They know that these are young scientists and specialists of the International Intergovernmental Organization "Joint Institute for Nuclear Research". They know that, unlike other youth structures, we are not a Council, but an Association and we really try to unite not only young employees of the Institute, but also young scientists from all countries. We are glad to see you as scientists, as lecturers, as conference participants, as co-organizers.

As for plans for the future. Having gained such a pace, the most important thing is to maintain it. Therefore, we continue to work: to assemble facilities, to carry out experiments, to process data, to obtain results, to write articles for publication, to defend ourselves, to communicate, to learn new things and to attend seminars at the Scientists' Club.

Vladislav ROZHKOV,
Chairman of the AYSS Council