From August 29th through August 31st, 70 of our PhD students and postdocs attended the Casimir Summer School 'Sun, Sailing and Science' in Grou (Friesland). We heard interesting talks from keynote speakers Massimo Mastrangeli (on organs-on-a-chip), Fernando Gonzalez-Zalba (on quantum computing), and Said Rodriguez (on harvesting energy from noise).

Most PhD students and postdocs also actively participated in the Summer School, either by presenting a poster during one of the poster sessions, or by presenting their research at the Casimir Short Talk sessions. The poster prize was won by Ilse Kuijf for her poster on “Self-supervised denoising for quasiparticle interference data”. The prize for best presentation was awarded to Stefan Huber for his talk titled "Structural biology and floating bacteria".

Apart from the scientific talks and workshops on Machine Learning and Entrepreneurship, all participants also joined for an afternoon of sailing. Although rain provided some challenges at first, the sun and strong winds towards the end resulted in a fun experience overall.

Generally, the participating PhD students and postdocs experienced the Casimir Summer School as a great opportunity to share their research with people from various backgrounds. The informal atmosphere lead to interesting discussions with speakers and colleagues alike. This edition of the Casimir Summer School was organised by members of the Casimir PhD platform, namely Luka Bavdaz, Corné Koks, Samadarshi Maity, Beatriz Orozco Monroy and Lucas Stehouwer, and the Casimir Office.