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..

Disseminating our results to the general public and drawing the attention of young people to the wonders of nanotechnology were defined as obligatory tasks in the original Lendület proposal. Moreover, I am also personally motivated to take every opportunity to reach out and spread the word about our work. That's why I was very happy to accept the kind invitation of the Natural sciences Self-development Club ("Természettudományos Önképzőkör") of the László Németh High School at Hódmezővásárhely to give an introductory talk about nanotechnology. The event was expertly organized by the head of the Club, Mr. István Szittyai. He is a highly motivated teacher and obviously invests a lot of energy into the Club. In the long run, this will pay off to all of us as his students become the open-minded scientists and engineers of the future.
I gave my talk on 10th May 2013 afternoon to an audience of 10+ students and two teachers. I hope to have given the attendees a usable general overview about the basics of nanotechnology. It was a nice experience and I will be very happy to visit the NL TÖK again.

Thanks to the great performance of our group member students last Spring and Fall, our group was well represented at the Chemistry Section of the National Scientific Students’ Associations Conference between 4-6 April, 2013 in Eger, Hungary. Five out of approx. 220 talks were given by students related to our group, thus our contribution to this national event was over 2%. All five talks went well so I am proud of all group members:

• Viktor Havasi
• Anna Király
• Nándor Kugyela
• Zita Ibolya Papp
• Márton Szabados

Congratulations to all speakers, let us hope for an even better performance in 2015!

The focus of this week was on the Szeged meeting of the NAPEP project. In this project researchers from Azerbaijan, Finland and Hungary have joined forces to create a nanotechnology platform that will help researchers from Azerbaijan broaden their collaborative network and be more involved in European projects in the future. 
The current Szeged meeting had two tasks:

1. A training event where researchers from the Baku State University were introduced to the Hungarian and Finnish technology transfer, innovation financing and intellectual property rights protection methods. 
2. A research workshop where the latest scientific results of all three participant groups were presented.

Moreover, we have had many opportunities for informal discussion and strengthening our friendship. On Thursday evening our project dinner was honored by Prof. Imre Dékány, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and President of the Szeged Regional Committee of the HAS. He informally discussed with the vice rector of the Baku State University and also with the coordinator of our NAPEP project  All in all, a very nice week indeed. Some photos from the week are presented below.

This entry is to keep the blog running. My teaching load has almost doubled in the past two weeks and I became somewhat ill as well, thus I had very little time to do  any useful stuff - no major breakthroughs this time, sorry folks. 
On the other hand, science in general has kept producing nice results of course. Please be sure to check our the "Science news" section for some highlights!

It is worth noting here that tomorrow (18th March) will be the first day of a Szeged based seminar organized by us for the FP7 "NAPEP" project. It will be attended by colleagues from Azerbaijan and Finland as well as by our own group members. This is the biggest event we organized since SIWAN 2012, so I'll keep the blog posted of course.

This week was dominated by European financing of our research. First of all, I submitted my application for an ERC Consolidator grant. This is a highly competitive call and frankly, my chances of success are small. On the other hand, I truly believe the submitted research theme to be original, interesting and important – so I had to try, hadn't I? Readers of this blog are kindly asked to keep fingers crossed for this proposal, it would mean a lot to our research group. 

The second European activity was the final meeting our our FP7 project "THEMA-CNT" in Vilvoorde, Belgium. The meeting was held on the premises of the project partner ON Semi on Thursday. THEMA-CNT was a very ambitious project focused on  developing carbon nanotube based chip coolers. It had its highs and lows, but in the end everything fitted together quite nicely and the final results are promising. I can't share the results here because a patent application is being considered, so I will share two pics I made on this trip :) 

The past weeks were really quite busy, so I'll take this weekend easy. Fortunately, a good example has already been set for me...

Activities of this week were not very spectacular but they are supposed to help the future progress of our group a lot:

• I finalized a new OTKA proposal,
• We discussed with some of our partners about joint industrial and teaching projects for this Spring, and
• the specifications for the new instrument purchases (GC-MS, infrared imaging system, high speed visible camera) were decided. I hope to officially initiate these purchase tenders by the end of next week at latest. 

New BSC and MSC students have joined our group for their thesis research. We welcome them all and have high hopes for achieving publication quality results with them. 
Last but not least, I was invited to give a talk at the ASME 2013 Congress in November 2013 in San Diego. Many factors will determine if I will be able to actually attend or not, but it is certainly a very nice move from the symposium organizers, thank you Robert!

Splendid news this week: the fifth (and last) paper presented at EUCMOS 2012 was also accepted for publication in the Journal of Molecular Structure. It is written by Andrea Rónavári et al, the title is "Structure and Stability of Pristine and Bi and/or Sb Decorated Titanate Nanotubes". DOI will be given in the Publications section of this site as soon as available.

Posts in this blog were delayed because last week I was at the annual meeting of the FP7 project "SusFoFlex". That project is focused on developing intelligent food packaging solutions and we are responsible for food spoilage sensor development. Actually, the SusFoFlex project is quite closely related to the main topic of our research group in that respect.