Meeting of the SMARTHEP European Training Network

TU Dortmund University hosted the 2025 annual meeting of the SMARTHEP European Training Network, a Europe-wide PhD program funded by the EU under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) under Horizon 2020.** The SMARTHEP European Training Network, which brings together expertise in real-time analysis from particle physics and industry, held its final annual meeting at TU Dortmund University during the week of September 15, 2025. Previous meetings were held in Manchester, Lund and Milan. The network includes 12 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) working at European universities and industry partners. Since October 2022, these doctoral students have been working on their doctoral projects within the framework of SMARTHEP, supported by stays at academic and industrial partners such as IBM France, Verizon, Ximantis, LightBox, Point8 and CERN. TU Dortmund University is involved as an associated partner and supervises two ESRs participating in the LHCb experiment at CERN.

During the meeting in Dortmund, the ESRs and associated students presented the progress of their work over the past year, worked together on an editorial and developed a particle physics escape room game intended for outreach activities in schools. In addition, the academic and industrial partners drafted the roadmap for the continuation of the network in a second phase, SMARTHEP II. In addition to the scientific program, the ESRs were able to experience some highlights from Dortmund and the Ruhr region: a skywalk on the Phoenix West site, insights into the city's traditional brewing culture and a visit to the UNESCO World Heritage Site Zeche Zollverein.

The week concluded with a public lecture in the series "Between bread rolls and Borussia" by Prof. Dr. Henning Kirschenmann (University of Helsinki), who spoke about how the LHC experiments deal with enormous amounts of data.

More about SMARTHEP: https://www.smarthep.org/