Fellows reunite in Liverpool as EuPRAXIA Doctoral Network nears completion
Liverpool hosted one of the final training events of the EuPRAXIA Doctoral Network, as all twelve Fellows came together for the project's Supervisory Board Meeting on 9 July 2026, at the close of an Advanced Researcher Skills and Careers Training Workshop, and the day before the Innovations for a Sustainable Tomorrow Symposium held at The Spine.
The meeting marked one of the last occasions on which the full cohort of Fellows will be assembled in the same place before the network's Final Conference on Isola d'Elba in September. It offered a comprehensive view of three years of work spanning the breadth of cutting-edge plasma accelerator science and technology. Presentations ranged across novel plasma- and laser-driven acceleration techniques, high-repetition-rate laser systems, low-level RF control, and a wide spectrum of beam diagnostics, from bunch-profile reconstruction and gas-jet monitoring to radiation detectors operating under some of the most extreme beam conditions tested to date. Together, the twelve projects illustrated how the network has pursued research that benefits the EuPRAXIA ESFRI research facility. This included studies into the generation and control of particle beams to the instrumentation needed to understand and exploit them, all the way to applications stretching from fundamental physics to medicine and industry.
Professor Carsten P Welsch, EuPRAXIA-DN Coordinator, reflected on what the meeting represented for the network: "Seeing all our twelve Fellows present together, three years on from when this major project started as little more than an idea on paper, was wonderful evidence of just how much this network has built. One of the most important outcomes are not the papers and prototypes, but the people, the collaborations between institutions, and the careers that are now launching from this foundation."
The Supervisory Board Meeting also served as a moment to take stock of the network's wider achievements and events: two international skill schools, a media skills school that produced a short film viewed more than 20,000 times, an international school on plasma accelerators held in Rome, three international workshops hosted in Pisa, Lisbon and in Pécs, as well as the EuPRAXIA Showcase event in Brussels, where European Commission and REA delegates were briefed on the project's progress. During the meeting, the Fellows and partners were asked to begin preparing narrative summaries of their fellowships, reflecting on three years of training, secondments and research across the network's nine host institutions.
Coming up next is the Doctoral Network's Final Conference on Isola d'Elba in September. The final Supervisory Board meeting in Liverpool offered an excellent marker of how far the twelve Fellows have come, and a preview of the research results they will bring to Elba as EuPRAXIA-DN approaches its conclusion.
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