The eighth Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) Collaboration Meeting was held at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) from July 25-29, 2016. More than 110 participants from institutions and universities in China and about 80 participants from abroad attended the meeting.

Wang Yifang introduced the latest progress of the JUNO project in his report. Many important steps, including tendering for PMT manufacturing, and development of medium-sized liquid scintillator test equipment, have now been achieved. At the meeting, researchers from all the sub-systems reported their progress and work plans. Five design reviews were completed during this collaboration meeting, include the installation of the detector, PMT instrumentation, electronics & trigger, calibration system and offline software system. These reviews will help to optimize the experimental schedule according the actual progress, and to ensure JUNO goes into operation as planned in 2020.

New members were approved to join the Collaboration at this meeting. They are the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (Pakistan), the National University of Defence Technology (NUDT) (China), the Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), the Universidade Estadual de Londrina (Brazil) and the Institute of Modern Physics of CAS (China). The Particle Physics Research Laboratory, Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), the National Astronomical Research Institute (Thailand), Comenius University, Bratislava (Slovakia) and the Institute of Electronics and Computer Science (Latvia) were accepted as observers. So far, the Collaboration boasts 66 formal members and more than 450 researchers. The meeting also elected new Experiment Board members and formulated the work plan for the next six months. The next Collaboration meeting will be held at Sun Yat-sen University’s Zhuhai campus in February 2017.