Abstract:

The summer training program for Italian graduate students at the Department of Energy (DOE) laboratory of Fermilab (Batavia, Illinois, USA), which was described two years ago at this Conference by one of us (Simone Donati), has grown very much in scope. In 2013 ISSNAF, the Italian Scientists and Scholars in North America Foundation (http://www.issnaf.org/) sponsored by the Italian Consiglio Nazionale degli Ingegneri (CNI, http://www.tuttoingegnere.it/PortaleCNI/), raised funds for a two-months training program in USA for Members of the “Ordine degli Ingegneri” (Engineering Professional Order) who are less than 35 years old. These young professionals would profit from training in the most advanced technology R/D at Fermilab that the Cultural Association of Italians at Fermilab (CAIF, http://www-org.fnal.gov/caif/Home.html) can offer to them. In 2013 CAIF hosted just 1 engineer. However, in 2014 this program is aiming at about 10 engineers, and will potentially become a major component of the CAIF educational effort.

This new program is rooted on the remarkable success of the summer training program for undergraduate students in science started in1984 by the Italian groups of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) collaborating in the Collider Detector experiment (CDF). Presently the program is run by CAIF under the sponsorship of INFN and of the Italian Embassy in Washington.

In 1984 the program involved only 4 physics students of Pisa University. The program was later extended to engineering students. Since 2004 the program is supported in part by DOE in the frame of an exchange agreement with INFN. An additional agreement to share support for engineers of the Scuola Superiore di Sant`.Anna (SSSA) of Pisa was established in 2007 between SSSA and Fermilab. Recently the program involved about twenty students each year. In total in 2010 - 2013 CAIF hosted at Fermilab 84 students from the universities of Bologna, Florence, Siena, Milan, Naples, Padua, Pisa, Rome, Turin, Trieste, Trento, and from the Polytechnic of Turin and of Milan. The training programs spanned from physics analysis of high energy proton-antiproton interactions to design of neutrino detectors and of accelerator components, from R/D on superconductive elements to particle accelerator theory, from analysis of astrophysical and medical data to advanced computing.

Since 2010 ISSNAF has been raising funds for training graduate students in the US from a number of Italian sponsors (INFN, the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI), the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF)). In the frame of this program in 2010-2013 ISSNAF has supported 17 CAIF summer students. Seven were trained at Fermilab, 10 at other US Laboratories or Universities including the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Langone Medical Center in New York, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

The 2014 training program to be described includes the new ISSNAF-CNI engineers and 21 graduate students, 2 of which are supported by ISSNAF and trained at the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and at Stanford University. In addition, detailed information on student recruiting methods, on the training programs and on student`s performance evaluation methods will be given in the presentation.