Abstract:

Since 1984 the Italian groups of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) collaborating in the Collider Detector experiment (CDF) at the national DOE laboratory of Fermilab (Batavia, Illinois, USA) have been running a summer training program for Italian university students. In the first year the program involved only 4 Pisa physics students. 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 for sharing support for engineers of the Scuola Superiore di S.Anna (SSSA) of Pisa was established in 2007 between SSSA and Fermilab. In 2010 the Italian Scientists and Scholars in North America Foundation (ISSNAF) started a similar program by supporting 10 summer students in several science institutions in the USA, including 4 students in the Fermilab program. In total in the years 2010 and 2011 Fermilab hosted a total of 45 students in physics and engineering from the universities of Bologna, Naples, Padua, Pisa, Rome, Turin, Trieste, and from the Polytechnic of Turin and Milan. Other Institutions in USA, including NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the Space telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the Langone Medical Center in New York, hosted 7 additional students. The training programs spanned from physics analysis of high energy proton antiproton interactions to construction of neutrino detectors and accelerator components to R/D on superconductive elements to theory of accelerators, to analysis of astrophysical data and analysis of medical data.

For the summer 2012 program we have selected 21 Physics and Engineering students. 18 will be working at Fermilab, 1 at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and 1 at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and 1 at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago.
The program is expected to grow greatly in the future being extended under the sponsorship of the Cultural Association of Italians at Fermilab (CAIF, http://www-org.fnal.gov/caif/Home.html), with a larger number of training stages in more scientific institutions outside Fermilab.
Information on student recruiting methods, detailed training programs, on funding, and on student`s evaluation of the program will be given in the presentation.