This award will help to support two workshops, one on composite materials and another on advanced ceramic materials, to be held in conjunction with the Ninth Inter-American Conference on Materials Technology in Santiago, Chile. The workshops will focus on new research developments in these fields with particular emphasis on applied research activities that are appropriate to the Latin American setting, including the utilization of locally produced materials as constituents of advanced composites and ceramic materials. The workshops will also address the need for appropriate curricula that would enable more Latin American countries to produce research and engineering personnel qualified to work in these areas. This Ninth Inter-American Conference on Materials Technology is the latest in a series of conferences which began in San Antonio, Texas in 1968, as a mechanism for bringing together representatives of the Inter-American materials research and applications communities to establish a dialogue ranging from exchange of state-of-the-art research to field applications of technology. In each of these conferences, there has been substantial involvement from Latin American sources as well as strong participation from the United States, Canada, and to a limited extent, from other nations outside the Western Hemisphere. The workshop organizer, Dr. Russell Drew of Science and Technology Consultants in Virginia, and the Organization of American States, which is contributing major support to the conference, have assembled a distinguished group of scientists from academia, industry, and government to participate in the conferences. This grant will partially support the participation of seven U.S. scientists and seven Latin American scientists in the two workshops and by so doing fulfills the objectives of the Science in Developing Countries Program to promote meetings and communication between scientists from the developing and developed world.***
