August 30, 2013 – Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Neutron Sciences Directorate and the University of Tennessee (UT)-ORNL Joint Institute for Neutron Sciences (JINS) are coordinating the second Cyber-Enabled Collaborative Graduate Education series, “Neutrons in Soft Matter Science (NSMS): Complex Materials on Mesoscopic Scales.”
The full term semester course, which begins Sept. 3, features lectures by scientists and professors from 16 contributing universities and institutions. The live courses are webcast from 2 to 3:15 p.m. each Tuesday and Thursday from Sept. 3 until Dec. 5. Online live attendance for registrants is via Adobe Connect login.
Scattering experiments using neutrons, X-rays and light are critical in studying structure and dynamics of soft-matter systems including water, colloids, polymers, surfactants solutions and biological macromolecules.
The current cyber course draws together an array of internationally recognized experts in both fundamental and applied aspects of soft matter scattering to provide a timely didactic presentation of theory, techniques and applications in this field.
The lecturing team includes:
- Simon Billinge, Columbia University/Brookhaven National Laboratory
- Benjamin Chu, Stony Brook University
- Juan Colmenero, University of Basque Country
- Bill Hamilton, ORNL
- Ken Herwig, ORNL
- Tim Lodge, University of Minnesota
- Chuck Majkrzak, National Institute of Standards and Technology
- Simon Mochrie, Yale University
- Bradley Olsen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- Dieter Richter, Jülich Center for Neutron Science
- Sunil Sinha, University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
- Jeremy Smith, ORNL/UT
- Eugene Stanley, Boston University
- Norm Wagner, University of Delaware
- David Weitz, Harvard University
- Yang Zhang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Multi-site interactive lecture sessions will be delivered live online. They are recorded and made freely available subsequently via streaming from the NSMS course resources page at ORNL, which will also contain various other materials associated with the course. To participate in the course, go to the course website and follow the registration instructions. Once registered, the course resources page can be entered via the LOGIN button on the course website. The Adobe Connect URL can be obtained from the course coordinator.
The course forms a broader partnership with universities that do not have professors teaching in the program. Several non-contributing departments have committed to include this course as a special or advanced topic in their Ph.D. programs, coordinated with a local professor within the department. Among the contributing universities, USCD and the University of Delaware will use the lectures as a credit-carrying course for their Ph.D. students.
At the end of August, the course had attracted more than 150 registrants including Ph.D. students, postdoctoral scientist and faculty worldwide.
The course is co-organized by prominent researchers in the neutron scattering field Sow-Hsin Chen (MIT); Sunil Sinha (UCSD), Takeshi Egami (UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Neutron Sciences) and the ORNL education manager, Meiyun Chang-Smith.
For more information, contact the course coordinator Meiyun Chang-Smith, [email protected]