The project “Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations and Interface Problems”, coordinated at the Centro de Matemática e Aplicações Fundamentais of the University of Lisbon, invites applications, until 6th February 2003, for a Post Doctoral Fellowship for research in Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations in one of the following topics:

• Free boundary problems
• Singular and degenerate parabolic equations
• Energy methods for evolution equations

I attach three papers that have been published in some special journals and may be of interest to scientists working on FBP. I suppose that the topics of these papers may be classified from the mathematical point of view as Free Boundary Problems.

On the occasion of the 80th birthday of Professor Enrico Magenes, his former students at the University of Pavia are organizing a two-day Colloquium in his honour in Pavia, June 18-19, 2003

The 9th Conference on Free Boundary Problems was held in Trento in June 5-8, 2002. This meeting gathered 159 participants from 22 different countries including Argentina, Cuba, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan. The conference registered 20 plenary lectures given by leading scientist in the fields of modelling, analysis and numerical treatment of PDE's, along with 7 focus sessions with three or four speakers each and a poster session with 64 contributions. In the opinion of most of attending people, the conference was a major event with a large success.

This is a six-month programme starting on 20th January 2003 which is to be held at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, UK.

It is a privilege to welcome again the FBPnews, almost ten years after the launching of the ESF/FBP scientific programme, now in a new format, with new people and renewed purposes. Since the end of that programme, in January 1998, the need of a newsletter to integrate and disseminate the information about the activities and the progresses of the interdisciplinary field of Free Boundary Problems has been felt. The continuation of the series of trianual conferences, as the FBP2002 held last June in Trento and the next one foreseen to take place in Portugal, shows the vitality and the importance of these mathematical topics in different domains of science and technology, in particular, the interdisciplinary role of Mathematics. The new FBPNews is more than a new series of the old newsletter since in addition to the up-dated news, announcements and reports, views and feature articles, its new and only electronic format will provide a Forum open to the World "FBP community", including the contributions of everyone with a real interest in fruitful discussions and interaction and serving the rich tradition of the FBP conferences.