The Natural sciences Self-development Club ("Természettudományos Önképzőkör") of the László Németh High School at Hódmezővásárhely organized its first summer camp this week in the Mártély recreational area near Hódmezővásárhely. Lectures from diverse fields of the natural sciences are given both by students and by researchers. I was invited by Head of the Club, Mr. István Szittyai to talk about one of my pet topics: process plant safety and industrial accidents. I had positive feelings after the talk, I hope it was received well by the audience. I've spent the whole Wednesday morning in the camp, thus I was able to enjoy three excellent lectures by Dr. János Halász, Mr. Mihály Bodzsár and Ms. Lili Török and a nice lunch with colleagues.
The summer camp is running this whole week long. The detailed program is available here. I wish I could spend more time there, the program and the company are both excellent indeed.

IMPORTANT: the nice people from Galileo Webcast are streaming all lectures live, please check this cool feature out on their homepage! I was told that the recorded and edited lectures will also be available at some later date 

Another overdue blog entry. 
4-7th June, 2013 Zoltán Kónya, Gábor Kozma and myself have participated at the midterm meeting of the FP7 research network "SusFoFlex". The meeting took place in Athlone, Ireland and was co-organized by our Irish partners Georgia Tech Ireland and System Label. The organization was flawless. The meeting went really well, we exchanged samples and ideas, undertaken a seminar on project result exploitation and visited the plant of System Label.
Among all the project meetings I have ever attended, this Athlone meeting possesses the ultimate bragging rights: the official project dinner was honored by the  company of Mr. John Perry, Minister of small business development for Ireland! :)

We were also very lucky with the weather, all sunny warm and beautiful. Ireland has really presented its nicest face to us that week.

I should have written this blog entry at the end of May but was too busy, really. We were in Baku, Azerbaijan between 22-26 May this year to attend the final full meeting of our FP7 INCO project "NAPEP". It was nice to see our friends again and the hospitality of Mustafa Muradov's team was wonderful as always. 
The scientific program was of a high quality. Moreover, we had the chance to discuss with several Azerbaijan governmental organization employees which helped us a lot to understand the possibilities of future collaborations between our groups. Two young colleagues working in the Szeged group (Henrik Haspel and Robert Puskás) have presented fine talks on their fields of expertise.

Baku is a beautiful, modern, controversial, dynamic city of many faces. The seaside promenade is second to none in Europe and invites for a very nice evening walk.

The cultural trip of this meeting took us from Baku to Quba, then up the Quidiyalcay valley to the Caucasus where we visited the hidden community of Khinaliq at 2300 m above sea level. Breathtakingly beautiful landscape combined with a remote, foreign, other-worldly culture, remnant of Caucasian Albania. Definitely an important personal experience in my life..

It is the end of the Spring semester at the University of Szeged, so it was time for the students to present and defend their theses. All students working under my co-supervision were successful and were allowed to continue to the state exam which will conclude their academic training. Their names in alphabetical order:

• Richárd Áy
  
• Dániel Berkesi
  
• Viktor Havasi
• Ákos Nagy
  
• Milán Vojnics-Rogics
  

Other students working in our larger research group but not supervised by myself were also successful:

• Dániel Kővári
• Nándor Kugyela
  
• Julia Schmehl
  
• Tamás Varga

Congratulations to all young colleagues, keep up the good work guys!