Summer Schools and Workshops

The Materials Computation Center participates in workshops, symposia, and meetings by providing funding, through organizing and hosting, and by providing instruction and lecture materials. Currently, the MCC sponsors the yearly "Understanding Complexity Symposium" and the "Recent Developments in Electronic Structure Methods", a roaming workshop initiated by UIUC.

Educational Materials

The MCC also holds annual Summer Schools on current topics in computational materials science, which typically generate about 30 hours of lecture videos and 1,000 pages of lecture notes. Many of the summer school teaching materials and computer labs are available for download from the School's websites, listed below.

Requesting support for organizing computational materials science workshops

The MCC will consider partial support for well-organized and relevant computational materials science workshops either:

• held on the UIUC campus, as part of our NSF/MCC "Workshop Program", or
• as part of our joint CECAM/Psi-K/MCC-organized, focused workshops. For these workshops, the Travel Award Program offers partial travel support to students, postdocs, and faculty from US educational institutions.

Please email proposals to proposals@mcc.uiuc.edu. Proposals should include:

• an abstract or overview of the workshop, including date and expected number of participants
• impact and beneficiaries
• contact information for organizers
• budget: total workshop cost and amount of proposed partial support from NSF/MCC
• the name of the CECAM/Psi-K program, if appropriate

Summer Schools

Many of the summer school teaching materials and computer labs are available for download from the School's websites, listed below.

• 2009 Nano-Biophotonics Summer School, June 1-12, 2009
• Recent Developments in Electronic Structure Methods (2008)
• Quantum Monte Carlo from Minerals and Materials to Molecules (2007)
• Multiscale Theory, Simulation, and Reality at the Nano-Bio Interface (2007)
• Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics Simulation Methods in Chemistry (2006)
• Hands-on introduction to Electronic Structure and Thermodynamics Calculations of Real Materials (2005)
• Introduction to Computational Nanotechnology (2004)
• Theoretical and Computational Biology (2003)
• Computational Approaches for Simulation of Electron Devices and MEMS (2002)
• Tools for multiple length and time scales (2001)

Workshops

The Understanding Complex Systems Symposium

The Understanding Complex Systems Symposium (UCS) brings together researchers from many academic disciplines and industry to stimulate cross-disciplinary research activities involving complex systems. Originated by Alfred Hübler (Physics, UIUC) in 2001, this event has grown yearly. The training of the speakers is rather diverse: Physics and Material Science, Engineering, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Genetics and Biology, Math, Bioinformatics Physiology, Management, Medical Science, and Social Science.

Over four days, UCS 2005 had 300 researchers, including two Nobel Laureates, and 150 graduate students, who gave 122 talks. The speakers came from diverse backgrounds: 3-6 speakers are Hispanic, one plenary speaker is African-American, one plenary speaker is an American-Indian woman, and there were over a dozen other female speakers. International speakers came from Armenia, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

• UCS Home Page

Recent Developments in Electronic Structure Methods

The annual Workshop on Recent Developments in Electronic Structure Methods connects active participants in electronic structure theory from universities, colleges, government labs, and industrial labs from around the world. The invited presentations and contributed posters describe new methods for computing previously inaccessible properties, breakthroughs in computational efficiency and accuracy, and novel applications of these approaches to the study of molecules, liquids, and solids. This workshop was started by David M. Ceperley and Richard M. Martin (Physics, UIUC) in 1989. In 19 years, this workshop has been hosted by 13 universities including:

• The Ohio State University
• Cornell University
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• University of California at Santa Barbara
• St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and
• North Carolina State University.

Each year, MCC provides seed money for the Electronic Structure Methods workshop. This funding enables wider local student participation and helps organizers gain additional support.

The MCC is hosting the 2008 Recent Developments in Electronic Structure Methods workshop, June 18-20, 2008.