Increase of FOM-Rijnhuizen mission budget after external evaluation

29 April 2009
"Very good to excellent" is how an international external evaluation panel, chaired by prof. dr. Friedrich Wagner (director of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics), judged the FOM Institute Rijnhuizen and its three scientific departments at the end of 2008. The department GUTHz even ranked "excellent" in the evaluation, the highest mark possible. In a letter to Rijnhuizen, director dr. Hans Chang of the FOM foundation conveys the congratulations of the FOM Executive Board. Together with FOM, the General Board of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) also expresses its appreciation for the excellent performance of FOM-Rijnhuizen.

The evaluation committee was very much in favor of reinforcing the fusion research effort and of the new research line into solar energy that FOM-Rijnhuizen is planning. The FOM Executive Board feels that these programmes warrant a structural increase of the mission budget of a quarter million Euros. The General Board of NWO, too, thinks that extra funding for these lines of research is important, and has added another quarter million Euros to the Rijnhuizen budget for the years 2009, 2010 and 2011.