Speaker
Dr
Tshepo Ntsoane
(Necsa)
Description
Over the last decade, the number of South African users accessing synchrotron facilities around the world has been steadily increasing with a significant fraction of the increase being early career scientists and students. In 2013, following a request by the synchrotron community, the South African government entered into a 5-year medium-term scientific relationship with the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF). The contract was aimed at facilitating support for SA’s Users assessing the ESRF synchrotron facilities for scientific experiments.
This talk will review the SA synchrotron-based activities undertaken over that period; this will include examples of the success achieved, the science carried out as well as beam time uptake in terms of the beam time usage. Areas of growth in terms of Users and disciplines will also be highlighted. Limitation of membership benefits emanating from the structure of the association will be discussed and alternative scenario that can assist in maximizing other membership benefits will be presented. Lastly the status of the contract; outlining possible role of young people at ESRF during the upgrade period will be presented
Primary author
Dr
Tshepo Ntsoane
(Necsa)
Co-authors
Prof.
Simon Connell
(University of Johannesburg)
Prof.
Wolf-Dieter Schubert
(University of Pretoria)
