HELEN: the future started in Rio

We had the first plenary meeting of the HELEN programme in Rio, involving representatives from all countries involved.

Luciano Maiani, the HELEN coordinator, wrote a very nice article in the CERN courier. I have also blogged a couple of times about HELEN (here and here).

The meeting goals were: to perform the first selection of applications, and effectively start the programme. About one hundred candidates were selected, and will receive a HELEN fellowship, mostly for exchanges between HEP labs in Europe and Latin America.

This is great news. CERN is of course the main destination of the programme, but there are also activities related to DESY, the Auger experiment, and to GRID technologies.  National HEP laboratories in Spain, Italy, France and Portugal will also be hosting students and young researchers from Latin America, and sending european physicists to Latin America as well.

This is great news. This first meeting with all representatives was an excellent opportunity to discuss about the future of the project, and new ideas arose. We are very confident that HELEN will boost the latin-american HEP community!

More information will be appearing at the HELEN web site: http://www.roma1.infn.it/exp/helen/