The ICMM Frontiers in Materials Science courses start with a huge reception

Nearly a hundred students applied for one of the 40 places. Among those admitted to the course are people from Spain and Latin America.

The I course of Frontiers in Materials Science has already started at the Institute of Materials Science of Madrid (ICMM), CSIC. This Tuesday, March 14, 40 people have started classes taught by center staff. Of these, 20 are in face-to-face mode, and 20 are online. Of the latter, 10 are foreigners, specifically from Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, and Mexico, reports Jesús Ricote, director of the courses.

Organized annually by ICMM, the courses have received almost a hundred applications from students worldwide, mainly from Spain and Latin America. These are two free courses framed in the Postgraduate program of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in which students are introduced to research at the frontiers of knowledge in materials science.

Most of the applications come from students with MAs in areas such as Material Science, Chemistry, and Physics. The majority of them are Ph.D. students at universities or research centers.

Each course is configured as a series of classes taught by researchers from the center who are experts in the field. In this way, each class will be addressed, after a brief introduction, presenting the basic foundations necessary to understand the research approach, its current development, and its possible lines of advance.

There will be a tour of various types of materials currently of interest due to their fundamental properties and/or their applications. Both the materials preparation and characterization procedures will be described, as well as the models to explain the underlying physical phenomena in the properties under study, as well as the design of applications and devices based on them. Open problems will be considered, posing what are the current limitations to solving them.

The topics covered include very diverse areas: molecular and supramolecular materials, biomaterials, materials for health, coatings, nanophotonics, spintronics, multiferroic materials, materials for energy conversion and storage, graphene, superconductors, and quantum computing, among others.