The 22nd meeting of the Joint Coordination Committee (JCC) on Cooperation of the Republic of South Africa (RSA) with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research was held on 20 June.

The Co-Chairs of the meeting were JINR Director RAS Academician Grigory Trubnikov and Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the National Research Foundation (NRF) of the RSA Clifford Nxomani.

JINR was represented by Chief Scientific Secretary Sergey Nedelko, Director of the JINR University Centre Dmitry Kamanin, Head of the International Cooperation Department Otilia Culicov, Director of the Laboratory of Radiation Biology Aleksandr Bugay, Deputy Director of the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions Grzegorz Kaminski, Head of the Group of South African Employees at JINR Arnoux Rossouw, Secretary of the Joint Coordination Committee Anna Kotova, and Counsellor of the International Cooperation Department Marina Tumanova. Also present at the meeting via videoconference were invited experts Dr. Semen Mitrofanov, Dr. N. Aksenov and Dr. S.Yakovenko, who represented particular strategic project proposals.

The JCC meeting was devoted to a number of topical issues of the bilateral agenda.

The central matter addressed by the Committee was the strategy for developing cooperation and, in particular, joint strategic-level projects. In this vein, the JCC discussed reports on the first two projects in the field of accelerator technologies and radiobiology, which were already approved at the previous Committee meeting and was satisfied with the results. Members of the JCC had a preliminary discussion about a new strategic project in radiochemistry and mentioned several other cooperation opportunities based on the use of the MT-25 microtron and positron-emission tomography.

JCC welcomed Wits University’s initiative and offered all possible support in establishing a Consortium of Universities that would participate in large-scale JINR projects. In order to showcase a numerous cooperation opportunities, a special JEMS training course organised exclusively for South African participants is to be held on 11 – 15 September this year.

The programme of joint events planned for the current and the next year is aimed at facilitating further JINR-RSA contacts. In particular, a Workshop on Theoretical Physics will be held as part of the Summer Study Programme in Theoretical and Computational Sciences at the Nelson Mandela University (NMU), organised by NMU and the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS) and scheduled for November – December 2023. In order to extend its collaboration network, JINR researchers also intend to participate in the 3rd African Conference of Fundamental and Applied Physics (ACP2023), the largest on the continent. Moreover, at the end of 2024 the RSA-JINR traditional triannual symposium is to take in Cape Town.

JCC also confirmed the intention of both sides to emphasize human capacity building programmes and to open the JINR information centre in South Africa in the nearest future.