The ILL recently welcomed NEPHEWS 'novice users’ as part of its Twinning Programme.
Kinga Szarkowska: completing a Master with a Large Scale Facility experience.
The Twinning Programme an innovative exchange initiative designed to pair “novice users” – researchers unfamiliar with large-scale facilities-with experienced research groups (“twins”) at European neutron, synchrotron, and free-electron laser infrastructures.
Over the course of one beamtime, these participants join hands-on experiments, learning organizational and technical skills directly from both experienced users and instrument scientists.
NEPHEWS supports this immersive learning by covering travel and accommodation expenses, inviting researchers at all career stages – especially those from Widening countries and Ukraine – to gain practical expertise, foster long-term collaborations, and build confidence in designing their own future experiments.
The NEPHEWS project is scheduled to run until December 2026, so there is still a possibility to apply to the NEPHEWS programme, filling up the short registration form online.
Kinga Szarkowska is a Master’s student at the Uniwersytet w Białymstoku, Poland, who joined the NEPHEWS Twinning Programme on the recommendation of her mentor, Katarzyna M. Recko.
Until then, her research on magnetite nanoparticles doped with lanthanides had relied mainly on X-ray techniques. The twinning stay at the ILL opened up a completely new perspective: she could work directly with neutron scattering experts and discover how these methods could complement her own studies.
For Kinga, the experience was not only about learning new techniques, but also about building confidence as a young researcher – discussing her many questions with the IN20 instrument scientist and even reworking a previously rejected beamtime proposal with expert guidance.
You can watch her story here.
Author: ILL team