Hermes 2016

At Cumberland Lodge and ready to start Hermes 2016. Excitement, nervousness and joy were flowing between the organisers.

It is Wednesday afternoon, 27^th of July 2016. There we were, at Cumberland Lodge and ready to start Hermes 2016, which we spent the past two years organising. Excitement, nervousness and joy were flowing between the organisers.

 As time passed, our guest speakers and participants slowly joined us and we kicked off the event with an interesting keynote talk by Dr Wimmer about his experience in science, start-ups, business and communication. After the talk and dinner our participants gathered in their groups to go on a treasure hunt (or better yet a “picture” hunt), organised for them as an icebreaking event. Luckily, the treasure hunt fulfilled its purpose and participants got well acquainted and ready to begin their journey at Hermes2016. The first day was a big success!!

This success continued into the second day where we had the honour of listening to Prof. Nicolas Spaldin from ETH Zürich give her masterclass on DFT. Her talk was unconventional, covering topics from Dark Matter cosmology  to CPT (Charge, Parity and Time) symmetry invariance in materials. She also set the participants  a fun little exercise; each group of participants chose a current, major problem in the world that they had to model or solve using materials modelling techniques. The groups discussed it for a short time and presented their solution to the rest of us. The audience were asked by Nicola to grade each presentation out of 10 but to ensure that their average grade was 5, i.e. we were not allowed to give 10 to everyone. This simple exercise helped everyone to put things into perspective and be honest in their feedback.

In the second half of the day we had an interesting second masterclass by Dr Soraia Pimenta, from Imperial College, on composites, where she explained different types of composites and ways of modelling them . At the end of her talk she proposed a simple exercise where participants were to compute the strength of a uni-directional composite, given the range of the strength for every single fibre. Straight after the composite masterclass Lulu Pinney, a freelance data visualisation expert who has worked with a variety of organisations including the BBC News website, introduced us to the world of infographics and data visualisation.  Here we learned how to extract and present a story from our work for our audience; we were given tips and pointers on what mistakes to look out for; for example, icons can be very cute but at the same time very misleading if not used correctly. After a fruitful and informative day everybody enjoyed a nice, free evening where people spent their time playing rounder’s or walking around and exploring Cumberland Lodge. Others simply get to know the other members of Hermes 2016.

This brings us to the morning of the third day; where we started with the very fun and engaging masterclass of Prof. Sauro Succi from the Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo “Mauro Picone” and Harvard University on Lattice Boltzmann (LB) methods and fluid mechanics. After explaining the theory behind LB, he showed us the amazing problems that can be modelled using this method and the interesting animations that can be extracted from them. After lunch we had Prof. Craig Carter and his wonderful team from MIT (Kyle Keane, George Varnavides and Emma Vargo) teach us about Mathematica and how it can be used for data visualisation. This led to the one-hour group work session, where participants were introduced to their science communication tasks, where they would present a visualisation of one of the masterclass topics on the final day. They also had the opportunity to talk to the relevant guest speaker and ask for any help they needed.  The day finished with another amazing talk by coach and consultant Piero Vitelli from Island 41 about presentation skills, where we got to learn the five key steps to a successful presentation. Going by the looks on the faces of the crowd present at the talk and the noise level afterwards in the poster session, I can say with certainty that this day was also a real success!

The fourth day was a bit more gently paced - in the morning we had an interesting masterclass by Prof. Kurt Kremer from the Max Plank Institute for Polymer Research on molecular dynamics and soft matter physics. This was followed by a 15 minute breakout session, where the participants had the opportunity to discuss what they had learned in the class and come up with the questions they wanted to ask the speaker. The afternoon was left free for the participants to work on their group science communication tasks and members of the organising team were there to help them in the process. At night you could see some people were still working hard but some were playing hard, relaxing in the bar or playing ping pong. But what they all had in common was the fact that the next morning their data visualisation and presentation skills were going to be put to the test.

Finally the fifth and final day of Hermes 2016 arrived and everyone gathered in their relevant groups ready to present what they had been working on for the past four days. There were a lot of interesting infographics and animations made by the groups and engaging presentations were given from each individual. Prizes were given to the winning group for their data visualisation and the winning individual from each group was given a prize for their presentation. Having seen the presentations, the effort that people put into Hermes and all the friendships that were developed over this time, I can say that spirit of Hermes lives on. I would like to express my thanks to all of our speakers who made the effort to come and teach us about material science across the length and time scales and the skill sets required to communicate our knowledge to others. Thanks to all the bright and interesting participants who joined us and made this event worthwhile. Thanks to our efficient and supportive administrators at the TSM-CDT for making the organisation process much smoother and last but not least thanks to all the organisers who worked very hard and dedicated a lot of their PhD time to make this event a success.