Marie Curie Actions: Inspiring Researchers - Imdea

What is more, Nanomag-Lab fostered new collaborations. Forinstance, on the EU-funded Fantomas project, the University ofBialystok has joined forces with 10 organisations across Europeto start a training network in nano-opto-magnetism. Moreover,Nanomag-Lab helped obtain additional funding to set up astate-of-the-art lab in Bialystok. ‘As a result of Marie Curie, weobtained support from the Polish government and we createda new, unique lab,’ Professor Maziewski says. ‘Now we cansupport projects on nanomagnetism not only in Poland, but inother parts of Europe. You can see it from the number of paperswe have published.’Too good to keep to themselvesBut the network did not want to limit its efforts to the scientifi ccommunity. The general public should also benefi t, the consortiumthought. However, ‘physics is not simple’, as ProfessorMaziewski knows. ‘For many scientists, it’s hard to discusstheir area of research with the public.’ Even the exchangeand transfer of knowledge from scientist to scientist is usuallynot quite as easy as one might believe. ‘Every university hassome unique knowledge. And that can be very interestingto share,’ Professor Maziewski believes. ‘Yet, sharing onlythrough publication of articles in different journals is notgood enough, because only a limited number of peoplewill read the articles, even in popular journals.’And how did they solve both of these problems? First, theNanomag-Lab team helped produce a fi lm entitled Nanomagnetsin an attempt to explain the science and its applications to abroader public. ‘This fi lm could be used for different people, inschools, for instance,’ Professor Maziewski thinks. Currently,it is available in Polish.On a more wide-reaching scale, the internet was the obviouschoice: ‘We started making experiments available to differentpeople with different levels of scientifi c understanding throughthe web,’ says Professor Maziewski, explaining the strategy.‘In our online experiment, we have a tutorial for different levels,high school or university students, for instance. So, they canlearn about magnetism on different levels. And after this, peoplecan start to learn more about nanomagnetism.’ The material –experiments and scientifi c texts – is available to everybody onlineand has already attracted thousands of users who wanted tolearn about the Faraday effect – the interaction between lightand a magnetic fi eld in a medium – or to observe magneticdomains, to name just two examples.242