The "Credits & Projects" call resulted in 12 grants for ambitious new projects. These include two "equipment" grants, eight "research credits (CDR)" grants and two "research projects (PDR)" grants, including one in collaboration with ULB. The FRIA doctoral research support call will fund eleven doctoral scholarships, and the FRESH call, three.

Two prestigious Mandat d'Impulsion Scientifique (MIS) have also been secured. This 3-year funding supports young permanent researchers wishing to develop an original and innovative research program while acquiring scientific autonomy within their department.

Let's also mention the two projects funded under the "WelCHANGE" call for proposals; an instrument for funding research projects with potential societal impacts, led by a main promoter from the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Appel Equipment

• Xavier De Bolle, Institut Narilis, Co-sponsor in collaboration with UCLouvain
• Luca Fusaro, Institut NISM

Call for Research Credits (CDR)

• Marc Hennequart, Institut NARILIS
• Nicolas Gillet, Institut NARILIS
• Jean-Yves Matroule, Institut NARILIS
• Patricia Renard, Institut NARILIS
• Francesco Renzi, Institut NARILIS
• Stéphane Vincent, Institut NISM
• Laurence Meurant, Institut NaLTT
• Emma-Louise Silva, Institut NaLTT

Call for Research Projects (PDR)

• Jérémy Dodeigne, Institut Transitions, Co-promoter in collaboration with ULB
• Luc Henrard, Institut NISM; Co-promoter: Yoann Olivier, Institut NISM

Fonds pour la formation à la Recherche dans l'Industrie et dans l'Agriculture (FRIA)

• Emma Bongiovanni - Promoter: Catherine Michaux, Institut NISM
• Simon Chabot - Promoter: Carine Michiels, Institut Narilis; Co-promoter: Anne-Catherine Heuskin, Institut Narilis
• Lee Denis - Promoter: Muriel Lepère, Institut ILEE
• Maé Desclez - Promoter: Johan Yans, Institut ILEE; Co-promoter: Hamed Pourkhorsandi (University of Toulouse)
• Pierre Lombard - Promoter: Benoît Muylkens, Institut Narilis; Co-promoter: Damien Coupeau, Institut Narilis
• Amandine Pecquet - Promoter: Nicolas Gillet, Institut Narilis; Co-promoter: Damien Coupeau, Institut Narilis
• Kilian Petit - Promoter: Henri-François Renard, Institut Narilis; Co-promoter: Xavier De Bolle, Institut Narilis
• Simon Rouxhet - Promoter: Catherine Michaux, Institut NISM; Co-promoter: Nicolas Gillet, Institut Narilis
• William Soulié - Promoter: Yoann Olivier, Institut NISM
• Elisabeth Wanlin - Promoter: Xavier De Bolle, Institut Narilis
• Laura Willam - Promoter: Frédérik De Laender, Institut ILEE

Fonds pour la Recherche en Sciences Humaines (FRESH)

• Louis Droussin - Promoter: Arthur Borriello, Institut Transitions; Co-promoter: Vincent Jacquet, Institut Transitions
• Nicolas Larrea Avila - Promoter: Guilhem Cassan, Institut DeFIPP
• Victor Sluyters - Promoter: Wafa Hammedi, Institut NADI

Mandat d'Impulsion Scientifique (MIS)

• Charlotte Beaudart, Institut Narilis
• Eli Thoré Institut ILEE

Appel WelCHANGE

• Nathalie Burnay Institut Transitions, in collaboration with UCLouvain
• Catherine Guirkinger Institut DeFIPP

Congratulations to one and all!

"Our wish was to create a real dynamic in our teaching and offer coherence to our students by all working around the same theme. Our team was also inspired by initiatives at the Faculty of Law, which has been practicing Fil Rouge for several years," explains Laurence Mettewie, head of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. "Already last year, without it having been explicitly thought of, several of our department's activities revolved around questions of reconstruction, transmission or even resilience." This observation prompted the team to formalize this approach by choosing a common theme.

Thus, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures has chosen to extend this reflection by looking at how individuals evolve, grow and pass on, with an intergenerational dimension that is particularly close to the team's heart.

Common readings, cinéclub, didactic trips, introductory research topics... there are several educational activities that will illustrate this common thread throughout the year.

The Germa Cinéclub will offer six films, in English, Dutch and German. To inaugurate this cycle, the team has chosen a film that illustrates the theme of lifelines: " Honig im Kopf" by Til Schweiger. This humorous and moving film tells the story of a grandfather suffering from Alzheimer's disease and his granddaughter who will do anything to "save" him, and thus takes a sympathetic look at themes such as dementia, family and memory.

In Dutch, research work in linguistics will focus on the question of linguistic transmission. Students will thus explore how languages are transmitted, are present at different stages of life or how they shed light on intergenerational links, for example through the use of WhatsApp.

The traditional study trip to the Netherlands will also be part of this theme. This year, we're heading for Rotterdam and Fenix, its new museum dedicated to art and migration, where one of the exhibitions recounts stories of mobility, anchorage and passage towards lives they hope will be better. This is an opportunity for students to confront notions of memory, displacement and cultural heritage at the very heart of a museum itinerary conceived as a succession of life lines.

Other activities will enrich the program: student projects specially designed to explore life trajectories, analyses of literary works guided by the theme and meetings with authors from Northern Ireland and Flanders: Wendy Erskine, and Lara Taveirne as well as her French translator Guillaume Deneufbourg.

To understand how the transition to Christianity came about, researchers generally turn to the great authors, and in particular Saint Augustine, the key figure of Christian antiquity whose writings have been preserved the most. Alongside his best-known works (such as The City of God or The Confessions), Saint Augustine is also the author of short treatises on practices such as marriage or baptism. "In my early post-doctoral research, I sought to understand how these short texts by Augustine, and other North African sources, circulated in the West between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This was a period of religious mixing when the first Christian communities were setting up systems of initiation and teaching", explains Matthieu Pignot.

Very quickly, the researcher's interest also turned to anonymous or pseudepigraphic texts (erroneously attributed to a known author), which had fallen into oblivion in favor of writings by authors, and which also addressed these questions of religious education. "This is the starting point for my research project. These texts are difficult to study because, circulating under several names, we don't know their true author. We don't know who wrote them, and we know little about their ancient and medieval transmission. It is precisely these grey areas that make them so interesting", continues the historian.

To address this question, Matthieu Pignot starts from two bodies of texts: on the one hand, a collection of 80 sermons wrongly attributed to Fulgence of Ruspe and, on the other, a Latin translation of an anonymous collection of Greek philosophical maxims by Rufinus of Aquileia (IV-V^th century), an author who played an important role in the transmission of Greek thought in late antiquity in the West.

The methodology favored by Matthieu Pignot for this research involves the use of digital publishing. The aim? "To bring into existence and enhance the value of these texts, which don't have the privilege of having an author's name, and some of which haven't even been printed. What's more, stylistic and linguistic analysis tools will perhaps make it possible to provide clues about the author, or at least to group texts together, based on recurring writing tics."

With this project, Matthieu Pignot also aims to develop the automated manuscript transcription component, which is still under development. "My aim is to contribute to the improvement of these tools through my own transcriptions and to participate in the dynamic of interest in medieval manuscripts in archives and libraries", concludes the researcher.

Matthieu Pignot is a member of the research center PraME("Pratiques médiévales de l'écrit"), part of the research institute PaTHs ("Patrimoines, Transmissions, Héritages"). He also collaborates with the Institut d'études augustiniennes (Paris) and the University of Nijmegen.

I was fascinated by the research field of one of my professors, Guy Demortier. He was working on the characterization of antique jewelry. He had found a way to differentiate by PIXE (Proton Induced X-ray Emission) analysis between antique and modern brazes that contained Cadmium, the presence of this element in antique jewelry being controversial at the time. He was interested in ancient soldering methods in general, and the granulation technique in particular. He studied them at the Laboratoire d'Analyses par Réaction Nucléaires (LARN). Brazing is an assembly operation involving the fusion of a filler metal (e.g. copper- or silver-based) without melting the base metal. This phenomenon allows a liquid metal to penetrate first by capillary action and then by diffusion at the interface of the metals to be joined, making the junction permanent after solidification. Among the jewels of antiquity, we find brazes made with incredible precision, the ancient techniques are fascinating.

In fact, this was one of Namur's fields of research at the time: heritage sciences. Professor Demortier was conducting studies on a variety of jewels, but those made by the Etruscans using the so-called granulation technique, which first appeared in Eturia in the 8th century BC, are particularly incredible. It consists of depositing hundreds of tiny gold granules, up to two-tenths of a millimeter in diameter, on the surface to be decorated, and then soldering them onto the jewel without altering its fineness. So I also trained in brazing techniques and physical metallurgy.

I applied for a position as a physicist at CERN in the field of vacuum and thin films, but was invited for the position of head of the vacuum brazing department. This department is very important for CERN as it studies methods for assembling particularly delicate and precise parts for accelerators. It also manufactures prototypes and often one-off parts. Broadly speaking, vacuum brazing is the same technique as the one we study at Namur, except that it is carried out in a vacuum chamber. This means no oxidation, perfect wetting of the brazing alloys on the parts to be assembled, and very precise temperature control to obtain very precise assemblies (we're talking microns!). I'd never heard of vacuum brazing, but my experience of Etruscan brazing, metallurgy and my background in applied physics as taught at Namur were of particular interest to the selection committee. They hired me right away!

CERN is primarily known for hosting particle accelerators, including the famous LHC (Large Hadron Collider), a 27 km circumference accelerator buried some 100 m underground, which accelerates particles to 99.9999991% of the speed of light! CERN's research focuses on technology and innovation in many fields: nuclear physics, cosmic rays and cloud formation, antimatter research, the search for rare phenomena (such as the Higgs boson) and a contribution to neutrino research. It is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web (WWW). There are also projects in healthcare, medicine and partnerships with industry.

For my part, in addition to developing vacuum brazing methods, a field in which I've worked for over 20 years, I've worked a lot in parallel for the CLOUD experiment. For over 10 years, and until recently, I was its Technical Coordinator. CLOUD is a small but fascinating experiment at CERN which studies cloud formation and uses a particle beam to reproduce atomic bombardment in the laboratory in the manner of galactic radiation in our atmosphere. Using an ultra-clean 26 m³ cloud chamber, precise gas injection systems, electric fields, UV light systems and multiple detectors, we reproduce and study the Earth's atmosphere to understand whether galactic rays can indeed influence climate. This experiment calls on various fields of applied physics, and my background at UNamur has helped me once again.

I was also responsible for CERN's MACHINA project -Movable Accelerator for Cultural Heritage In situ Non-destructive Analysis - carried out in collaboration with the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Florence section - Italy. Together, we have created the first portable proton accelerator for in-situ, non-destructive analysis in heritage science. MACHINA is soon to be used at the OPD (Opificio delle Pietre Dure), one of the oldest and most prestigious art restoration centers, also in Florence. The accelerator is also destined to travel to other museums or restoration centers.

ELISA uses the same accelerator cavity as MACHINA. The public can observe a proton beam extracted just a few centimetres from their eyes. Demonstrations are organized to show various physical phenomena, such as light production in gases or beam deflection with dipoles or quadrupoles, for example. The PIXE analysis method is also presented. ELISA is also a high-performance accelerator that we use for research projects in the field of heritage and others such as thin films, which are used extensively at CERN. The special feature is that the scientists who come to work with us do so in front of the public!

I remember that in 1989, I finished typing my report for my IRSIA fellowship in the middle of the night, the day before the deadline. It had to be in by midnight the next day. There were very few computers back then, so I typed my report at the last minute on one of the secretaries' Macs. One false move and pow! all my data was gone - big panic! The next day, the secretary helped me restore my file, we printed out the document and I dropped it straight into the mailbox in Brussels, where I arrived after 11pm, in extremis, because at midnight, someone had come to close the mailbox. Fortunately, technology has come a long way since then...

The proximity between teaching and research inspires and questions. This enables graduate students to move into multiple areas of working life.

Come and study in Namur!

Serge Mathot (May 2025) - Interview by Karin Derochette

• The CERN accelerators complex
• The Science Portal, CERN's public education and communication center
• Newsroom - June 2025 | The Departement of physics hosts a delegation from CERN
• Newsroom and Omalius Alumni article - September 2022 | François Briard