Hands-on Summer Schools

History

Harry was on a U.S. committee in 2003 to discuss possible ways to involve developing countries in science research. Being the only person with a background in small scale experiments Harry was overwhelmingly outvoted when the committee proposed building a $30 million accelerator in Jordan (7 years later $15M has been spent on the accelerator and they are looking for more funding to finish building it.)
Harry together with Kenneth Showalter and Rajarshi Roy wrote a proposal to run a hands-on research summer school in a developing country. The proposal was rejected by World Bank, NSF, APS and several others before being accepted in 2006 by UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) and the ICTP (International Centre for Theoretical Physics) on the stipulation that the proposal be re-written as a plan for 3 summer schools over 3 years.
In 2008, 2009 and 2010 there were summer schools India, Brazil and Cameroon.

Summer Schools

Each school lasts 2 weeks and has 10-15 U.S. faculty members, each accompanied by 1-2 graduate students, 50-60 participants (young faculty and graduate students) from 15-20 different developing countries.
Participants come from physics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and medical research (maybe others)
Each summer school costs $200K-$250K with all costs (including travel) for participants covered by the school. NSF provides funds for U.S. scientists’ involvement and MathWorks provides Matlab licenses for each participant.
Each day consists of breakfast, a morning introductory lecture on a topic of relevance, 3-4 hours doing experiments, lunch, another introductory lecture and 3 hours doing experiments or tutorials or workshops.
In addition to experiments there are also tutorials/workshops on how to design experiments, interactive teaching methods, how to build computational models, how to present posters and give talks.

Experiments

Bruce ran a Taylor-Couette experiment looking at the onset of instability and the time dependence of the emerging patterns.
Setup was a very small machined Taylor-Couette system (a few hundred dollars), a computer to control the motor that rotates the inner cylinder and a webcam to capture the patterns. Analysis was done in Matlab.
Chieze lead biophysics sessions looking at flatworms and how they multiply when cut (a flatworm is ~30% stem cells) and Planoria locomotion and how the locomotion changes as the Planoria are cut. The Planoria are 3mm-12mm in size and so can be tracked with the naked eye and webcams.
Chieze also helped teach participants some of the Physics Circus’ favorite demonstrations to use in high school and university.

Success

Lectures/experiments emphasize common tools between experiments (Fourier transforms, good experimental practices and data acquisition and analysis).
Many participants can’t afford to attend conferences in Europe or the U.S. so this is a great collaborative experience for them.
Many participants have never done serious experiments because they didn’t know you could build experiments for ~$2,000. Often the summer school experiments are left with participants to use in their own schools and classrooms.
Many participants go on to run their own workshops and summer schools for their local faculty to share what they learned.
Harry et. al already have summer schools planned for Shanghai, Guatemala and somewhere in the Middle East.
Still looking for possible fixed locations for the schools and for more continued funding.