This award supports participation in an East Asia and Pacific Advanced Science Institute (ASI) to be held July 28 - August 2, 2003. The main collaborators are Professor Ramamoorthy Ramesh at the University of Maryland in College Park and Professor Akihisa Inoue at Tohoku University in Japan and Ms. Yuko Furukawa of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) in Japan. The seminar will provide an opportunity for discussion of recent developments in various fields of materials science and to promote international collaboration and cooperation in innovative research on advanced materials. The program will focus on key issues associated with the science and technology of advanced functional materials. Among the fields to be addressed are magnetic and electronic memory storage materials. Nanomaterials is currently one of the most dynamically developing fields of materials science. Nanostructured materials is a relatively new field that features various types of prospective substances demonstrating a wide range of superior properties. Among them are materials with exclusively high mechanical, enhanced magnetic, electronic and optical properties. Such properties have been made possible by a very small structure unit (grain, particle, layer) size ranging from 1 to 100nm, which is much smaller than those obtained in conventional metallic materials or alloys.
Current topics of high interest, such as self assemblies, spin electronics, wave functional materials (photonic crystals, sonic crystals, and fractal photonics), advanced ferroelectric thin film structures, will be addressed in the seminar. These recently emerging topics show promise in becoming new fields of physics and material science. The Advanced Science Institute is designed to provide opportunities for promising researchers from the East-Pacific region to meet and interact in a professional context, with the expectation that such interaction will stimulate life-long interest in international research cooperation and encourage international network building among them. The Institute will include about 40 promising researchers who have obtained their doctoral degrees within the preceding 10 years. In addition, eminent senior researchers from around the world will deliver lectures and guide workshops and interactive sessions.
