"If I dream it, I can find it here"

A crumpled, mangled mass of metal was all that remained of Dr. Azza Talab's white car after an accident on the streets of Cairo in April 2010.  Talab escaped alive, but was confined to her bed with 14 metal pins inserted in her shin.  In such a condition, the doctors told her, it would be impossible for her to walk unaided for two to three years.  Yet Talab proved the doctors wrong, with the help of important people in her life, and with motivation from ICTP.

"For three months I was on my back and couldn't move.  It was so difficult," Talab said.  "But through all of this, I put my computer on my chest and began to write my application to ICTP for the plasma activity," Talab added, reffering to the Joint ICTP-IAEA Workshop on Dense Magnetized Plasma and Plasma Diagnostics held in November 2010.

Talab's first contact with ICTP was in 2001, when she applied as an early-career PhD student to a four-week activity on plasma physics.  Unlike the rest of her colleagues from the Atomic Energy Authority who were applying, she had no publications or conference presentations to her name. Her department's leader even recommended that she not send in her application.

It was thus a surprise to everyone, including Talab, when she was the only one accepted from her department.  Talab had never left Cairo before, much less Egypt, and it wasn't until another colleague was accepted two weeks later that she finally decided to go.

At ICTP, she was the first to arrive and the last to leave each lecture, but didn't interact much with her fellow participants because she was self-conscious about her English skills.  After a brief conversation with Swadesh Mahajan, one of the school's organizers, though, who encouraged her to interact more with the other scientists, she made friends and collected email contacts, something that was new to her since there was no internet in Egypt at the time.  "I returned from this trip and my mind completely changed," Talab said.

Talab completed her PhD in 2003, building a miniature tokamak, a device that uses a magnetic field to confine plasma, a state of matter that is essentially an ionized gas.  By building it herself from Egyptian materials under the supervision of her advisor, Professor Masoud, she learned how the machine worked, and later used it to teach the first university-level courses on plasma physics in Egypt. "It's not important to have applications or to study many parameters, but the first step must be, what is the physics of this?" Talab explained.

Meanwhile, Talab became a frequent visitor to ICTP, returning in 2003, 2005, and then every year until 2010.  But for personal reasons, soon after earning her PhD, Talab ended her own research work.  Talab thus wasn't expecting to be admitted to the 2010 ICTP workshop. 

When she was surprised for a second time by her acceptance to an ICTP activity, she wrote to the organizers to tell them she couldn't travel to Italy because of her recent accident.  Joseph Niemela, the head of ICTP's applied physics section, wouldn't accept her inability to walk as a reason not to attend, however, and sent someone to pick Talab up from the airport in Rome and take her to ICTP.  Talab arrived at ICTP with a cane, but with the help of the participants and professors at the seminar learned once again to walk without it.  "Professors I'd never even dreamed to meet before tried to help me, taking my hand as I began to walk," Talab recalled.

While overwhelmed by the generosity and kindness of the scientists at the seminar, Talab also said that it is typical of the treatment she's received at ICTP throughout the years.  When she came for the first time in 2001, she recalled, "I was afraid that other people wouldn't accept me for who I was - a Muslim - because of what happened in America.  But from that time until now, I find very nice smiles from all the faces working here.  If I dream it, I can find it here."

During the 2010 seminar, she met ICTP director Fernando Quevedo and was impressed with how easy it was to converse with him.  "All of this encouraged me to change, and also change the research in Egypt," Talab said.  She now strives to treat her own master's students in the way she has been treated by eminent scientists at ICTP, encouraging them to apply for similar programs early in their careers.  "If you're not accepted, it's good, because you'll learn why you were refused.  But if you don't apply and send it in, like I did in 2001, you can't go anywhere," she said.

Currently, Talab is conducting research with the team at the dense plasma focus (DPF)- Bora laboratory, part of ICTP's Multidisciplinary Laboratory (MLab), with the goal of developing boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT), a radiation procedure to help treat cancer.  In BNCT, which is not yet in wide medical use, the neutron pulses from a plasma focus device like the one in the MLab are short (in the nanosecond range) and powerful (2.5-14 MeV).  This potentially increases the selectivity of the treatment while reducing the total radiation absorbed by the patient.  To make sure the neutrons get deep enough into the tissues, the fast neutrons generated by the plasma focus device must be moderated, or slowed down, to what are known as "epithermal" neutrons.  Talab's main project has been to find out how best to do this.  She is proud to be part of the hard-working team at DPF-Bora tackling this important problem.

Thanks to her research work at ICTP, she will be eligible for a promotion at the Atomic Energy Authority in Egypt when she returns at the end of July from lecturer to assistant professor. 

Talab credits her attendance at the 2010 ICTP plasma seminar, and the encouragement of Quevedo, Niemela, Vladimir Gribkov, and many other ICTP scientists, with the successful rebirth of her research career.  "When I returned from the seminar, I took home with me a very important piece of information.  I didn't die in the accident," Talab said.  "I'm sure I will die.  I don't know when.  But until I die, I must live.  So I must return to my work again."