The Brazilian Funding Agency, CAPES, presented Carolina Benone's PhD Thesis with an Honorable Mention. This award results from a Brazilian national contest for the PhD theses defended in 2017. Carolina's thesis was supervised by Professor Luis Carlos Crispino from Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA), Brazil, and includes research performed with Gr@v members, as a result of two long term visits of Carolina's to Gr@v during her PhD.  Hearty congratulations Carolina!

From October 2018 onwards, Carlos Herdeiro, one of Gr@v's founding members, became an Associate Professor at the Physics Department of IST-Lisbon. The photo shows group members and Yves Brihaye, visiting from Mons University, enjoying a wonderful "parrilhada de peixe", by the seaside, a few kilometers from the Aveiro Campus, on September 28th 2018.

Professor Kunihito Uzawa from Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan, visited Gr@v in the last week of September 2018 and gave a seminar on "No-Go theorems for ekpyrosis from ten-dimensional supergravity". (In the photo with Eugen Radu.)

Gr@v members Pedro Cunha and Carlos Herdeiro were two of the speakers of the Workshop "Dynamics in Strong Gravity" that took place at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto, Japan, 1-14 September 2018.

The XI Black Holes Workshop will take place at IST-Lisbon on 17-18 December 2018. The Black Holes Workshops gather researchers working on physical and mathematical problems of black holes, both in its classical and quantum aspects, as well as their connections to general relativity and gravitation, string theory, cosmology, and astrophysics, and stimulate the interaction between all these issues.

The paper "Spontaneous scalarisation of charged black holes", co-authored by Gr@v members C. Herdeiro and E. Radu, together with N. Sanchis-Gual and J. A. Font, from the U. Valencia, was published in September 2018 in Physical Review Letters.

From September 2018 onwards, Alexandre Correia, one of Gr@v's founding members, became an Associate Professor at the Physics Department of Coimbra University. Gr@v warmly congratulates Alexandre on this well deserved promotion. The photo shows a farewell dinner organised in July 2018 with collegues from Aveiro University.

Conventional wisdom says the influential physicist John A. Wheeler coined the term black hole in 1968. But a deeper analysis reveals a much richer story, that starts centuries ago in a British India prision. This fascinating story features in the July 2018 edition of "Gazeta de Física", the newsletter of the Portuguese Physics Society, authored by C. Herdeiro and José S. Lemos (in Portuguese).

Gr@v attained a high success rate in the FCT 2017 Call for "Scientific Research and Technological development project grants" with three funded grants out of the 49 funded grants nationwide within the Physics Evaluation Panel, corresponding to 6% of this funding. The Gr@v members leading the three funded projects are 1) Alexandre Correia (PI); 2) Carlos Herdeiro and Eugen Radu (PI/co-PI); 3) Marco Sampaio and António Morais (PI/co-PI).

João Rosa was interviewed for Porto Canal's "Mentes que brilham" about his work on stimulated axion decay around primordial black holes as a possible origin for fast radio bursts, recently published in Physical Review Letters. He also gave a related interview to the radio programme "Click" on Antena 1.