Sami Halaseh, DC3 has been about a month into his PhD now at LAAS. Most of the administrative things have been taken care of and its nice to be able to focus on his work. He is still in the foundation building stage, but he quite enjoys that part. Everything is new and you see things from the ground up.
Everyone at LAAS has been very welcoming. The supervisor has helped Sami greatly with getting familiarized with the system of the lab, and his fellow PhD students have been showing him around the city. He also joined the rock climbing club at LAAS.
Toulouse is a cute city and the weather has been so much nicer than he was used to up north. He has been eating a lot of French pastries, his favourite is Canelés.
In November, Matej Dolezalek, DC4 at University of Konstanz, commenced his PhD studies within TENORS, starting with his secondment at Università degli Studi di Firenze. After moving to Florence, he began working with Giorgio Ottaviani and Nikhil Ken on the problem of classifying defective secant varieties of Segre-Veronese varieties.
Henri Breloer, DC7 at UiT: “Moving to the arctic city of Tromsø has been a very novel and exciting experience for me. When I arrived in October, I did a lot of hiking, exploring the beautiful mountains and fjords surrounding the island. Now the northern lights and near-total darkness of the polar night make living in Tromsø a truly extraordinary experience.
I enjoyed meeting all the different people working here and feel already at home. Chatting with the people in the department about maths and other parts of life is always a pleasure. So far I have learned a lot of new and interesting mathematics and worked on very intriguing problems.
Looking forward, I am excited to meet the other DCs in France next spring and move there for my secondment at Inria later that year.”
