© ASTRON

One of the traditions at the annual Nederlandse Astronomen Conferentie (NAC; Netherlands Astronomy Conference) is the poster competition. This year, University of Amsterdam & ASTRON PhD candidates Dirk Kuiper, Sylvain Ranguin and Lars Zwaan won 3rd prize for their combined poster "EuroFlash: A 24/7 commensal search machine for (not-so) fast radio transients". The prize committee emphasised both the scientific quality of the work and the creative approach of combining three poster submissions in one mega-poster, which underlines the importance of collaboration and teamwork in science.

Dirk, Sylvain, and Lars are advised by Cees Bassa, Jason Hessels, Ziggy Pleunis, and Antonia Rowlinson at UvA/ASTRON, and they're working closely with ASTRON postdocs Reshma Anna-Thomas and Inés Pastor-Marazuela on LOFAR transient searches. With the new EuroFlash system on LOFAR2.0 we will be able to perform these searches in real-time, which enables rapid multi-wavelength follow-up to understand the astrophysics of newly discovered sources.