Chicago-Chile Materials Collaboration
Chicago, January 21, 2008: In July, 2003 the Chicago Materials Research Center announced a new collaboration and exchange project with the University of Chile (UCHILE) and the University of Santiago (USACH). It is made possible by the US National Science Foundation and Chile's Comision Nacional de Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnologica (CONICYT). In the intervening years the project has sponsored forty physics undergraduate and graduate students from these Chilean universities and from the University of Chicago. These students found their internships very worthwhile, according to followup studies. They found the internships valuable for language and cultural resonsl, but most importantly for giving them a genuine experience with research. Several internships resulted in prominent scientific publications. The collaboration studies the intricate pattern of forces in sand, the sharp structures in thin crumpled sheets, the creation of threads and breakup in flowing fluids and other nonlinear phenomena. The main aim of the ongoing project is to broaden the education of US and Chilean physicists in training, drawing on the international prominence of the nonlinear physics research at both institutions. The National Science Foundation and its counterpart agency in Chile have granted funds for exchange visits of nominal ten weeks' duration for undergraduates and graduate students from the US and Chile. The director of the Chicago Materials Research Center, Prof. Sidney Nagel, has delegated physics professor Tom Witten as the co-ordinator for the US part of the program. The leaders on the Chilean side are Prof. Enrique Cerda at USACH and Prof. Nicolas Mujica at UCHILE.
The program sponsors one or two visits annually between Chile and Chicago by faculty members in the collaboration.
The internships for Chicago students generally occur during their summer break, starting from late June or early July and running for ten weeks. Internships for Chilean students occur during Chicago's winter quarter, coinciding with their own summer break. For graduate students, the exchange visit forms part of the students research experience, playing a role similar to participation in a summer school. Visits will last 2-3 months and would typically happen early in the student's doctoral research. US grad students will work in the lab of a Chilean professor whose research is related to the student's Chicago research.
During their two weeks in Chile, Chicago students are asked to participate in several English language practice sessions for Chilean students hoping to come to Chicago.
The web site for the Interamerican Materials Collaboration is http://jfi.uchicago.edu/~tten/Chile/.
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