The TALENT/INT course on "Nuclear forces and their impact on structure, reactions, and astrophysics" was held at the INT from July 1-19, 2013. The course covered modern theoretical approaches to nuclear forces, including pionless and chiral effective field theory, renormalization group methods, and connections to QCD. A special focus was on which parts of nuclear forces drive different physics in light-to-heavy nuclei and at neutron-rich extremes. All course material and videos of the lectures can be found on the website: http://archive.int.washington.edu/PROGRAMS/talent13/.

This first TALENT/INT course was a great success, also due to the energy and enthusiasm of all the participants! The 26 student participants were selected from over 50 applications. They included 20 theorists and 6 experimentalists, with 13 participants from the US, 1 from Canada, and 12 from Europe. The lectures were given by Richard Furnstahl and Achim Schwenk, with special guest lectures by Alexandros Gezerlis and Zohreh Davoudi. The afternoons were spent on discussion questions and hands-on problem solving assisted by postdoctoral expert facilitators, especially Kai Hebeler, Heiko Hergert, Georgios Papadimitriou, Carolina Romero-Redondo, Vittorio Soma, Kyle Wendt and local postdocs.

This was Course 1 of the nine planned courses in the TALENT initiative ("Training in Advanced Low-Energy Nuclear Theory") to develop a graduate program of excellence in low-energy nuclear theory. Further details about TALENT can be found at the website: http://nucleartalent.org.