About
Where four communities meet. The Alpine School on Magnetics was born from a simple observation: some of Europe's most active magnetism communities sit clustered around a single mountain range. Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland each have a vibrant research scene, yet for early-career scientists the borders between them too often remain just that. The IEEE Magnetics Society chapters of the four countries came together with the conviction that the Alps, which divide these countries on the map, could just as well unite the people who study magnetism within them. AlpMag is the result: a school carried by all four and rotated among them, each edition organised by a leading group in the host country, so that each year a new generation of PhD students and young researchers can meet across national lines.
A school for the European magnetism community. AlpMag is open to everyone, whether or not they belong to a learned society. It is made possible by the IEEE Magnetics Society, its principal sponsor, and by the European Magnetism Association (EMA), which supports research and training in magnetism across Europe, together with our other sponsors.
Science on the mountain. The idea that gives the school its character is the deliberate pairing of rigorous teaching with the shared experience of the mountains. Mornings belong to intensive, hands-on training; afternoons belong to the slopes; evenings to talks and conversation. It is a format built on the belief that the best collaborations rarely begin in a lecture hall — they begin on a chairlift, over a shared run, or at dinner after a long day outside. By bringing students together in this informal alpine setting, the school aims to turn a week of learning into the start of lasting friendships and scientific partnerships that span the whole Alpine region and beyond.
A fitting metaphor. There is, fittingly, more than coincidence in holding a magnetics school in the Alps. The mountains themselves are a monument to convergence: they rose where the African and European plates collided and locked together, and the rocks that record that history carry, frozen within them, the imprint of Earth's ancient magnetic field — a paleomagnetic memory that helped reveal how continents move. Magnetism is, at heart, a story of alignment — of countless small moments finding a common direction and, together, giving rise to something far stronger than any one of them alone. That is precisely what AlpMag hopes to achieve among the four communities it brings together: many individual researchers, drawn from across the Alps, aligning into a single, coherent, and enduring European network.
