This award will help support a 12 month research visit to the laboratories of the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI), in collaboration with Dr. Yasuharu Sugiyama. Dr. Kim will take part in experiments at subbarrier energies which are tailored to study the earliest phase of heavy-ion reactions through nuclear interactions. These experiments should advance our views of interactions between heavy-ions below and near the interaction barrier. These experiments were conceived and proposed by the Reaction Dynamics Group of the Oak Ridge National Lab Physics Division and rely on the superb resolving power of the magnetic spectrometer (ENMA) and the high-quality heavy-ion beams of the JAERI laboratory.