On 29 March 2019, the largest Russian scientific festival “PRONauka” (lit. “PROScience”) was held in Kazan. It is one of the largest social projects in the fields of science popularization that included an extensive range of educational intensive courses, lectures and discussion sites in which professors from the Kazan Federal University and JINR scientists took part. Each series of the Festival in Kazan brought numerous activities together at one platform: lectures by leading researchers from all over Russia the main topics of which were world-scale projects, “smart” interactive activities, workshops, spectacular entertainments, modern education and acquaintance with like-minded people.

JINR participated in the scientific festival in Kazan on the invitation of Director of the Institute of Physics of the Kazan Federal University S. I. Nikitin. Since 2015, JINR has been cooperating with the Institute of Physics which has the JINR-based department “Nuclear and physical material science”. The exhibition stand of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research was attended by more than 2 thousand people. The interactive stand with a large number of educational applications, information materials about the Institute and its educational opportunities, posters and pamphlets with the latest version of the Periodic Table and souvenirs interested children of all ages.

The interactive stand with information about the basic facilities of JINR and educational programmes for children attracted their attention.

Next to it, Dmitry Klimansky, Researcher from VBLHEP JINR, held the educational interactive lecture about the atomic structure demonstrating tracks of elementary particles in the Wilson chamber (the elementary tracking detector of particles, a simplified version of the famous condensing chamber of Charles Wilson).

The rich programme was prepared for the lecture part of the Festival at which JINR was represented by:

• Nikita Sidorov, programmer engineer from the Veksler and Baldin Laboratory of High Energy Physics JINR, a member of the STAR experiment collaboration (BNL). He provided the lecture “Colliders of the 21 century” in which he explained the operation principles of various accelerators, their types and applications.
• Alexey Voinov, Head of the Group of the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions JINR, provided the lecture “New elements of the Mendeleev’s Periodic Table” in which he explained how pioneering research on search for superheavy elements conducted in the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions JINR for the last 15 years led to the discovery of 6 last elements.

Organization of the JINR participation in the scientific festival in Kazan was made by Alexey Voinov (FLNR JINR), Kirill Gikal (FLNR JINR), Dmitry Klimansky (VBLHEP JINR), Olga Radosteva (UC JINR), Nikita Sidorov (VBLHEP JINR), Oleg Smirnov (UC JINR), as well as Anastasia Suschevich (UC JINR).