Positive progress

Despite of the dark and gloomy weather here at Oulu (as always this time of the year), the past weeks have been very positive with several nice occasions.

Firstly, in mid-October we travelled to the Arctic Circle assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland. There, our joint effort of the past year-and-a-half, a highly illustrated popular science book INTERACT Stories of Arctic Science, was published and 300 copies of the book were distributed to the participants of the assembly. What a great event, and I am so happy and proud of the book which illustrates the fantastic work conducted by the scientists with support from INTERACT Transnational Access during the past years!

Secondly, last week we went to Poland to attend the Annual Consortium Meeting. The event was held at the most beautiful place at Jablonna Palace, a carefully renovated building from the 18th century, which nowadays serves as a congress centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The surrounding park was just as astonishing as the palace itself, with big majestic trees in variety of autumn colors. It was the most inspiring place to have a meeting, and we left invigorated and eager to continue working for the future of INTERACT.

The rest of the year looks rather busy. We’ll start preparing a new application to Horizon2020, and in addition continue collaboration in organizing some major science events that will take place next year –the first one will be the Fulbright Arctic Symposium on February 11th 2016 here at Oulu. But more about those later on!