INFN participates in the African School of Physics 2022

The seventh edition of the African School of Physics will be held between 28 November and 9 December 2022 at the Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, with a rich series of events.
Founded in 2010 with the primary objective of helping physics students of African universities to get in touch with fundamental research in the world’s great physics laboratories, the African School of Physics has organized its biennial editions mainly in the states of Central Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, seeking to develop a more fruitful integration of the universities of the region with the realities of advanced research in fundamental physics and its applications.
The previous editions were held in Ghana (2012), Senegal (2014), Rwanda (2016), Namibia (2018), with a gap caused by the pandemic in 2020. The normal course of the biennial editions of the ASP resumes this year, this time organized in South Africa, from where the ASP took off 12 years ago (first edition of the ASP in this country in 2010). The ASP has by now become a consolidated reality not only as a  School of Physics at the university and PhD level, but also as an outreach initiative towards society and local school environments. It  interacts with regional and national governments to facilitate the incubation of research projects based in Africa but supported by the international scientific community (such as the African Conference of Physics and the proposal/project for the African Light Source – AfLS). APS enjoys the active support not only of INFN but also of most of the major international research laboratories and institutes (CERN, DESY, ICTP, DOE, PSI, GSSI, etc). From the point of view of academic contributions to the APS, the INFN usually presents seminars and lectures on the physics of dark matter and gravitational waves (F. Ferroni, E. Coccia) and on the physics of particle accelerators and advanced radiation sources (L. Serafini, A. Bacci). Last but not least, the ASP also develops a mentorship program that helps students and alumni of the various editions to direct their academic career at the doctoral and post-doctoral levels. In our INFN Section there is a former student of ASP-2016 (Sanae Samsam) who attended, and is finishing, the INFN national PhD in Accelerator Physics. 100 students from 40 African universities are expected to participate in person (fully supported at ASP expense), and another 100  as online participants, together with 80 high school teachers and approximately 500 high school students.