The School on Biological Soft Matter was held at ICTP-SAIFR from March 13-24 and organized by C. Cotta (COPPE-UFRJ), F. Duda (COPPE-UFRJ), R. Eichhorn (NORDITA), J. Koiller (INMETRO), S. Pasquali (U. Sorbonne Paris Cité), A. Ribeiro (UNIGRANRIO) and F. Barroso (USP-Ribeirão Preto). Topics covered in the first week included nucleic acids, proteins and electrostatic interactions, while bioengineering was the main theme of this activity in the second week.

The School on Interaction of Light with Cold Atoms was held at ICTP-SAIFR from Jan. 30 - Feb. 10 and organized by R. Bachelard, P. Courteille, R. Shiozaki and R. Teixeira from USP São Carlos, and R. Kaiser (I. Non Linéaire de Nice). The lecturers. J-M Raimond (U. Pierre & Marie Curie), J. Walraven (U. Amsterdam), C Weitenberg (U. Hamburg), L Davidovich (UFRJ), J. Shaffer (U. Oklahoma) and C. Zimmermann (U. Tübingen) and speakers covered topics including light scattering, cold and ultra-cold matter, quantum information and quantum optics.

The sixth edition of the Southern-Summer School on Mathematical Biology was held at ICTP-SAIFR from January 16 - 27. During the first week, Prof. Roberto Kraenkel (IFT-UNESP) covered the basics of population biology and his lectures were supplemented with modelling exercises. During the second week, up-to-date topics in ecology and evolution were covered by F. Débarre (Collège de France), A. Nourmohammad (Princeton U.), S. Petrovskii (U. Leicester) and A. de Roos (U. Amsterdam).

Applications are open for two Simons-FAPESP research professor positions. Depending on the qualifications of the candidates, the positions will be either permanent professorships or 4-year professorships with the possibility of tenure after 3 years. Candidates from all areas of theoretical physics are encouraged to apply, and preference for one of the two positions will be in the area of complex systems with connections to biology. Although applications will be accepted until the two positions are filled, candidates are strongly encouraged to apply before May 31, 201

Applications are open for a joint school and masters program between IFT-UNESP/ICTP-SAIFR and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Students in the last year of their undergraduate studies will be selected to the joint masters program through an annual school and exam, and will spend one year at IFT-UNESP/ICTP-SAIFR and one year at the world-famous Perimeter Scholars International (PSI) masters program in Waterloo, Canada. The application deadline is April 28, 2017.