The 8th annual Cockcroft Institute Postgraduate Conference (CIPGC) was held on 30th October 2019 at the Merrison Lecture Theatre of Daresbury Laboratory. It attracted 45 postgraduates and academics from all four CI Universities (Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester and Strathclyde) and ASTeC. CI Director, Prof. Peter Ratoff gave an opening speech. He welcomed the participants for this event and stressed the importance of presentations. It was followed by the introduction of the CI postgraduate training program by Dr. Hywel Owen, the Head of CI Education and Training. Dr. Guoxing Xia, the organiser of this event gave a brief introduction about the event arrangement and the panel members. It was then followed by 10 presentations covering a wide variety of research activities going on in the Institute.
A judging committee made up of academics from the CI partners marked each presentation based on their presentation style, technical content, research context and question handling. The overall quality of the presentations was very high. First prize was given to Volodymyr Rodin (Beam tracking studies in ELENA transfer lines) from the University of Liverpool. Second prize went to Georgia Adam (Modulated electron beam produced by a thermionic cathode electron gun for a particle accelerator) from University of Strathclyde, and the Third prize was received by Harry Jones (Plasma waveguides for laser-driven plasma wakefield accelerators) from the University of Liverpool.
In addition to the presentations, a poster session was also held. Senior postgraduate students presented their posters and introduced their research results to their peers and judging committee members. The best poster prize was given to Jenny Morgan (Spatially inhomogeneous polarization from free electron lasers) from the University of Strathclyde.
The CI Postgraduate Conference is an important annual event for all CI postgraduates and it provides a platform for them to network and present research results to their peers and experienced academics. The event this year was very successful. The students enjoyed the well-prepared presentations, high quality posters, nice dinner and of course a social event-a bowling game in Warrington!