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8/29/2014

This is just a quick entry to mark the end of August and the beginning of the Fall semester next Monday. Although August was really busy for me from a purely personal point of view, science has largely been on holiday. Nevertheless, we still managed to get one more paper ("Mechanochemically assisted synthesis of pristine Ca(II)Sn(IV)-layered double hydroxides and their amino acid intercalated nano composites") accepted in the Journal of Materials Science this month, thanks to the keen determination of the lead author, Dr. István Pálinkó.

My plans for this semester besides teaching include:
- SIWAN 6,
- annual meeting of the VOCSENSOR project,
- completion of the SusFoFlex project,
- carrying on with the research plan of the Lendület group, and
- finishing and submitting really _lots_ of manuscripts.

I'll keep you all informed here. Until then, I wish all readers a happy, stress-free and successful Fall semester!

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Report on the second "Lendület" project year

8/1/2014

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The second year of the Lendület project that finances our group ended on 30 June, 2014 and I've submitted the scientific progress report about it yesterday. Let us now review the highlights of this second year!

Personnel: we have one predoc and two full-time lab assistants on the group paylist. Our postdoc, Dr. Erzsébet-Sára Bogya finances herself from an individual MTA postdoctoral grant. Two more colleagues and three PhD students are employed by the University of Szeged but work continuously with us. 20 dissertations were supervised by group members and defended successfully in this second year (15 B.Sc. thesis', 3 M.Sc. project works, 1 M.Sc. thesis, 1 Ph.D. thesis).
Infrastructure: 53.9% of this year's financing was spent on infrastructure development. Major purchases: microbalance, spectrofluorimeter, fuel cell tester, IT infrastructure development, furniture.
Published results: 16 papers were published (or accepted for publication until June 30, 2014) in SCI journals for a total impact factor of 59.6 in the second project year. In addition, 8 more publications appeared in periodicals without an impact factor. Group members have participated at several conferences in Hungary and abroad. They presented 30 oral contributions and 8 posters. The publication targets defined in the original Lendület proposal for the 2nd project year were met.
Dissemination: the group was in the news 5 times and we have given 5 introductory talks to non-specialists in the first project year. The group homepage and our Facebook page are active since October 2012. 89 people like our Facebook page where the entry with the highest visibility has been seen by over 300 people. Google Analytics tells me that our homepage was visited by 1868 people in the second project year. The number of foreign visitors has grown by 9% from the first to the second project year.
Additional financing: approx. 63% of the total external financing expected by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has been secured by members of our group until now. The second project year has seen the launch of the M-ERA.Net project "VOCSENSOR" (OTKA NN 110676 in Hungary, PI: Akos Kukovecz) which alone has opened over 17 Million HUF support to our group for the 2014-2017 period.
Scientific highlights: the project runs on schedule so far, the planned milestones have all been reached. One out of the six hypotheses' that were originally targeted as the research objectives of the Lendület group has been verified. Our four most important results in the second year were: (i) participation in the development of a gastight polyurethane nano composite material, (ii) a phase map for the nitrogen doping of trititanate nanostructures, (iii) identification of the differing evaporation profiles of water on different carbon nanotubes and (iv) first-ever fluctuation enhanced sensing experiments on an increasingly popular chalcogenide.

Summarizing. I believe that we are on the right track and that we will be able to continue delivering high quality research results. Thanks for reading this, have a nice summer everyone!

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Report on the second "Lendület" project year

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