Chairman’s Report

2015 has been a very successful year for Psi-k.The major event was the conference in San Sebastian with nearly 1200 participants enjoying the program of high scientific quality in excellent facilities and beautiful surroundings. In addition, there has been a busy program of altogether 26 workshops and other events. The Psi-k Scientific Get-together at DPG spring meeting (this time in Berlin) drew 430 participants. The new website has become operational and is well received.

The Psi-k Community was also very successful in European Union’s e-infrastructure call for Centers of Excellence (CoE) in computational sciences. In the area of materials and molecular sciences, all the three proposals from the community were funded:MAX with Elisa Molinari (Modena) in lead, NOMAD with Matthias Scheffler (Berlin), and ECAM with Dominic Tildesley (Lausanne, Dublin). This is a huge opportunity to us to push our methods and capabilities forward and make the results and data widely available in applications. The three CoEs will work in close collaboration and also coordinate there training and dissemination activities.

2015 is also the final year of the European Science Foundation(ESF) support for Psi-k (or any other research network). From now on, Psi-k will be dependent on the voluntary support of its member groups and the income generated from the major conferences and through other means. The Steering Group of the ESF Network will gather to its final meeting in Paris next week. This means also that we need to introduce new governance models for the Psi-k Community.

I want to thank all friends of Psi-k for their support and enthusiasm.

Risto Nieminen

Psi-k Chairman