April 15th, 2013

Annual reports from years 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Chicagoans in Chile, July-September 2012

Seven Chicago undergraduates wrote extended letters of application for internships.   The six chosen students all completed successful internships. The students and their Chilean supervisors and topics are as follows.

name	year	supervisor	topic	outcome
Baker, Kevin	1	R. Cordero, USACH	strength of fruit cuticles	studies are ongoing
DeJongh, Ethan	2	M. L. Cordero, UCHILE	rapid viscosity measurements via meniscus observations in microchannels	publication anticipated
Ezzyat, Taha	2	C. Aliaga, USACH	partitioning of a molecule with the free radical TEMPO in a surfactant solution	publication anticipated
Garcia, Steven	1	F. Vivanco, USACH	effect of system size a sheared granular monolayer	publication hoped for
Poethke, Sam	2	E. Hamm, USACH	ridge morphology induced by collapsing a plastic membrane over a protruding object	followup simulations in progress
Zarcone, Ryan	2	N. Mujica, UCHILE	escape from the stable vibrational state of granular monolayers: granular explosions	studies are continuing

Results

The supervisors of these students all gave their impressions to the Chicago co-ordinator.  With the exceptions noted below, the supervisors expressed satisfaction with the students' work, affirming that the students benefitted the lab. Some sample evaluations:
•  "It was a tricky experiment he was working on and he did not get definite results. However, he started the experiment from zero and advanced a lot."
• "Excellent. He was able to carry out the measurements and retrieve from them valuable information."
• " We did do some progress in data anlysis and I am happy with the result."
•  "He seems motivated and is enthusiastic. "
• "I have to mention that ... is a very motivated and enthusiastic student."
• "[the internship program]   was a great experience for me and our students.   I miss him a lot."
  

A debriefing session for the returning students was held October 19. Five of the six interns participated. All expressed satisfaction with their experience. All five gave a detailed account of their results and reversals and skills learned and talks and reports presented.  The students told of their projects and adventures and gave advice about any future logistic arrangements.

Chileans in Chicago: January-March 2013

Our remaining funds were sufficient to invite two Chilean interns in 2013; Details of these projects are shown here.

Camilo Ulloa is a third-year physics student at the Universidad de Chile. He worked jointly with Prof. William Irvine, a U of C grad student named Chris Heinrich and myself. Camilo's job was to implement an experimental setup to investigate a novel mode of liquid droplet fission. He made several major revisions of the original plan and had to try many variations. By the end of the project Camilo had obtained a stable experiment and reproduceable fast video record of the fission process consistent with the numerical work of Chris Heinrich. Camilo left detailed accounts of his methods and data. His persistence and resourcefulness brought the project to a successful conclusion. We are planning a publication describing this novel method.

The second internship was a return visit by Sergio Correa of USACH. Sergio was a very effective intern in 2011, his research group was very pleased that we could arrange a return visit. In his work in Prof. Doug MacAyeal's group continued there joint project on the bouyant instability leading to massive overturn of ice floes in the arctic coastlines. As before Sergio's immediate supervisor was Dr. Justin Burton. This year's work on the pressure field during the overturn in their laboratory model system is being prepared for publication.

Publications

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