International Collaboration

The NYU MRSEC faculty members have many ongoing international collaborations, and the Center will consolidate and enhance existing interactions while developing new ones. The Center will focus particularly on connecting its junior faculty with international laboratories and collaborators. Our overall goal is to expand the impact of the Center beyond the U.S., leverage resources in partner institutions, and provide our graduate students and postdocs with an increased awareness of research at the international level, including research experiences abroad and student exchanges. International efforts organized and sponsored by the NYU MRSEC will include:

Interactions with Asia.  Building on existing and successful past collaborations, the NYU MRSEC will have formal agreements for scientific exchange with several institutions in Korea through key individuals. These include Seoul National University (SNU), Kyung-Hee University (KHU), and Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (KAIST, Seung-Man Yang). These research collaborations will include student exchanges and short-term visiting scientist appointments at NYU and the Korean schools. These collaborations will be reinforced by formal agreements with Brain Korea-21 (BK-21) programs at SNU (Professor Seung Jong Lee, Director, with Profs. Kookheon Char and Jongheop Li, International Relations) and KHU (Professor Woo-Sik Kim, Director), which include provisions for student and faculty exchange as well as joint workshops and symposia (see SNU BK-21 agreement, supporting documents).
Interactions with Europe. NYU investigators have strong connections with several European institutions, each with a principal scientific contact, including University of Utrecht (Alfons van Blaaderen), Cambridge University (Daan Frenkel), Ecole Superieure de Physique et Chimie Industriele (Jacques Prost, Jerome Bibette), Universite Louis Pasteur (Wais Hosseini), Weizmann Institute (Sam Safran, Meir Lahav, Isabelle Weissbuch), and the University of Milan (Piero Sozzani, Angiolina Comotti).

International Partner Workshops. NYU and its partner international institutions will convene workshops on an annual basis, rotating among NYU, Korea, and Europe. These workshops will be focused on specific topics of mutual interest to the participating institutions. Recognizing that the vitality and growth of the MRSEC hinges on the success of its junior faculty, the MRSEC will emphasize their participation in these symposia. This component will borrow from a successful format used for the existing Amsterdam-New Amsterdam workshops, a collaborative effort involving the NYU Center for Soft Matter Research, University of Amsterdam, and the University of Utrecht. Meetings at NYU will be convened at the New York Academy of Sciences at its new site in the NYC financial district. Located on the 40th floor of 7 World Trade Center, the NYAS has facilities for conferences, poster session, and dining, with sweeping views of Manhattan and the surround area. The NYAS as more than 60 corporate sponsors, and it will naturally draw academic and industrial scientists and engineers from the NYC region beyond NYU. Meetings in Europe and Korea will be organized by the designated host. The inaugural MRSEC-supported workshop will be held during Spring 2009 at the NYAS.