After the successful seminar of the national group of Ukraine at JINR in 2011, it was decided to hold it annually, and on 19 November 2012, second reporting seminar was held in DLNP Conference Hall. Like in the previous year, representatives of the JINR Directorate, directors of the JINR laboratories and the UC, their deputies attended the seminar. A representative delegation of Ukrainian scientists headed by Academician of NAS of Ukraine, Plenipotentiary Representative of the Government of Ukraine at JINR Boris Grinev arrived from Ukraine. He opened the seminar, starting it on a business and positive note.

The Ukrainian national group is quite large, and despite choosing one representative per research project to present, there was not much time to tell about all the projects done in the past year. In the previous year, a similar seminar gave an opportunity to feel the difference between presentations at a scientific conference and a seminar report, and almost all speakers succeeded in presenting their results within the 10-minute limit, which made it even more difficult to choose the best report. Finally, the best reports were “Small-angle neutron scattering spectrometer YUMO” by Alexander Ivankov and “Features of melting lipids in aqueous solutions” by Dmitriy Soloviev. This may have been expected, as half of the reports were made by the FLNP staff. And the most delicious reward – a cake delivered from Kharkov – was earned by Alexandra Kravtsova who presented the report “Characteristics of concentration of heavy metals by lithophyte-epiphyte complex in the coastal zone of Crimea”, based on a study of pollution of Crimean coastal waters with heavy metals.

The seminar convincingly demonstrated, that although the Ukrainian national group is the youngest in JINR, it has a remarkable place in the Institute in both quality of scientific papers and their quantities (88 works published this year, 26 more were sent to be printed, 59 reports were made at international, Ukrainian, and Russian conferences).