Outreach

Gr@v members contribute frequently to outreach initiatives in order to bring scientific knowledge and developments to the global community. Such initiatives include (see listing of recent activities at the bottom of this page and also our outreach events page):

  • Summer Academy, for high school students, organised by the Physics Department of Aveiro University;

  • Master Class in Particle Physics, for high school students, an international initiative in which Aveiro University participated for the first time in the 2011 edition;

  • Odisseia pela Física; physics colloquia directed to university students (not necessarily of physics), as well as high school teachers and students. The first edition took place in 2010/11;

  • Science Popularisation activities developed by the Fábrica Ciência Viva centre in Aveiro;

  • Seminars given in local high-schools to increase public awarness of science and in particular physics;

 

Some suggestions of outreach videos on science and scientists

A great promotional video for the LISA space-based gravitational wave observatory

 

A TEDx talk by Carlos Herdeiro on gravitational radiation (in Portuguese).

 

Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan (with Portuguese subtitles) - a scientific poem.

 

A unique color video footage on Albert Einstein

 

Rare footage on the 1927 Solvay Physics Conference

 

Please contact any of us (emails provided in the People subpage) if you would like to suggest us outreach activities with our participation.


Alexandre Correia on the 2019 Nobel Physics Prize

Alexandre Correia, Gr@v member and Professor at Coimbra University, gave an outreach talk on the part of the 2019 Nobel Physics Prize awarded for the discovery of the first exoplanets. Not only Professor Correia is a working scientist on the field, but he also worked, as a post-doc, in the group of the two laureates, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. A knowledgeable and entertaining account!

Visit to Belém do Pará, Brazil

Gra@v members C. Herdeiro and E. Radu, together with Nuno Santos from IST-Lisbon, visited Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPa), Brazil, in Amazonia, during November 2019, within the Marie Curie RISE FunFiCO partnership. In the photon in the river Guamá, with Carolina Benone, a former UFPa/Aveiro PhD student, now staff at UFPa.

Pedro Fernandes moves to Queen Mary

Pedro Fernandes, a student that graduated from IST-Lisbon, after doing his Master thesis under the supervision of C. Herdeiro and E. Radu on "Spontaneous Scalarization of Charged Black Holes" is moving to Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, where he obtained a scholarship for pursuing his Ph.D. studies. Congratulations Pedro!

Pedro's farewell lunch

Gr@v members had a lunch get together to bid Pedro Cunha farewell. Starting next week, Pedro will join the Max Planck institute for gravitational physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Germany, as a research fellow. And one of the best "Arroz de Tamboril" in the country will make sure Portugal and Aveiro will be missed! See you very soon Pedro!

FunFiCO mid term meeting

The Marie Curie RISE project FunFiCO, led by Aveiro University, had its mid term meeting on July 13th 2019 in Valencia. It was a very successful assessment of all activities so far.

CAPES Honorable Mention for Carolina Benone's Thesis

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!

Carlos Herdeiro becomes Associate Professor at IST-Lisbon

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.

Visit of Kunihito Uzawa

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.)

Who coined the name "black hole"?

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).