*** 9732626 Merritt The University of Chicago Department of Physics will continue to administer an REU site project, targeted especially for women and minorities. The overriding objective of this project has been and continues to be to encourage members of under-represented minority groups and women to pursue careers in physics. Applications are solicited nationally from undergraduate programs in physics and engineering with particular emphasis on historically black colleges and traditional women's colleges and local Chicago area and Midwestern colleges and universities. The core of the program for each student participant is a research project under supervision of an individual faculty member. Each student is given specific, well defined research task that can be completed within the ten-week duration of the program. The research groups in which projects are conducted are experimental for the most part, but have included quite a few theoretical projects. Typical projects are distributed among the areas of high energy physics, cosmic ray and space physics, astronomy and astrophysics, general relativity, condensed matter physics, optics and solar energy, and electron and ion microscopy. ***