Photo: Prof. Hitoshi Murayama, Director, IPMU at the University of Tokyo and Professor, University of California, Berkeley
FUTI has awarded a travel grant of $10,000 to support an exchange of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows between The Institute of the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IMPU) at the University of Tokyo and the Berkeley Center for Theoretical of Physics (BCTP) at the University of California, Berkeley. The IMPU-Berkeley was established in 2007 to promote collaboration between the physicists at the University of California, Berkeley and the IMPU at UTokyo.
Under the exchange program, Japanese students and researchers from the IPMU at UTokyo will benefit from exposure to the active research environment in Berkeley with a broad spectrum of topics in theoretical particle physics. At the same time, Berkeley members will be exposed to a wider variety of topics at the IPMU at UTokyo normally not discussed within the BCTP.
The FUTI’s grant is expected to support the travel of five Berkeley students or postdocs going to the IPMU at UTokyo and six UTokyo students travelling to Berkeley. In October, BCTP is planning a workshop on supersymmetry at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN, Switzerland. The IPMU-UTokyo will host frequent workshops called “focus weeks” which will benefit Berkeley members who are FUTI award recipients.
IMPU, an institute hosted by the University of Tokyo, is one of the five centers established by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Technology in 2007 under the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI Program) with the purpose of creating top world-level research centers. The IMPU’s collaborating international institutions include the Department of Physics, University of California-Berkeley, Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, and l’Institute des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in France. In the words of its Director, Hitoshi Murayama, it is “a unique research center in the world that spans from pure mathematics to theoretical physics, to experimental physics, astronomy, and applied mathematics.”
During the 2010-2011, FUTI’s grant for the IMPU-Berkeley was applied to support the travel of three graduate students and two postdocs at Berkeley visiting IMPU-UTokyo and six UTokyo members participating in workshops and other events at Berkeley. Physics research is both collaborative and international, and this grant that fosters the travel and exchange of young scientists supports this notion.
Please visit the IMPU’s website at http://www.ipmu.jp/ (English) and http://www.ipmu.jp/ja (Japanese).
Articles in this newsletter:
- Call for Nominations for new Secretary and Treasurer
- The New Office and Mailing Address of FUTI
- Annual Board Meeting
- FUTI Announces Travel Grants for Graduate Students and Postdocs Involved in the IPMU-BCTP Collaboration
- Reports from the Participants of IARU’s Global Summer Program
- Invited Article: Activities of “Kagakusha Network” (“Scientist Network”) and a Guidepost to Study at U.S. Graduate Schools.
- Fundraising Results and Financial Statements of July 2010 through June 2011
- Revamping of the FUTI Website Completed
- Dr. Masaaki Yamada appointed Director of University Relations
