Project Profile
Pennsylvania State Consortium for Education in Many-Body Applications (CEMBA)
Pennsylvania State University at University Park
Abstract
This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a multidisciplinary graduate training program of education and research in many-body applications. For many traditional problems in science and technology, the fundamental interactions are well understood. The challenges are in the complexities that arise when there… more »
This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a multidisciplinary graduate training program of education and research in many-body applications. For many traditional problems in science and technology, the fundamental interactions are well understood. The challenges are in the complexities that arise when there are more than a few electrons or atoms or particles involved. Included among these many-body problems are predictions of the electronic structure of molecules, molecular dynamics, the interactions of molecules with solvents, protein folding, catalytic reactions at surfaces, ferroic materials, the flow of fluids in porous media and the coupling of gas dynamics with chemical reaction. The solution to these and related problems lies in the effective use of high performance and massively parallel computers by scientists and engineers developed through a cross-disciplinary graduate training program in many-body problems.
The Consortium for Education in Many-Body Applications (CEMBA) IGERT program is a joint effort of nine faculty from the Departments of Aerospace Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Computer Science and Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Mathematics, and Physics. CEMBA incorporates new courses, research projects, summer internships, seminars and tutorials to train students for leadership roles in advanced computational methods for many-body systems. The program will give students extensive experience in many-body approaches and their implementation on high-performance computers. CEMBA is designed to train a new generation of scientists and engineers with breadth and interdisciplinarity, with the technical skills and the experience to lead in the solution of these many-body problems.
IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the third year of the program, awards are being made to nineteen institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences; Engineering; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; and Education and Human Resources. « less
