ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN STATES
Inter-American Council for Integral Development
(CIDI)
FIRST MEETING OF MINISTERS AND HIGH
AUTHORITIES OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
November 11-12, 2004
Lima, Peru
OEA/Ser.K/XVIII
DRAFT
25 October 2004
Original: English
Hemispheric Initiative
“Inter-American Materials Collaboration through the Inter-American Materials Collaboration
(CIAM) Programs”
Introduction
Advances in materials sciences and engineering enable progress across a broad range of
scientific disciplines and technological areas with dramatic impacts on society, including energy
efficiency, environmental protection, health-care costs, information infrastructure, and modern and
reliable transportation and civil infrastructure. Continued progress in materials science and
engineering is increasingly dependent upon collaborative efforts among different disciplines, as well
as closer coordination among funding agencies and effective partnerships involving universities,
industry, and national laboratories. Because of the interdependence of countries’ national priorities,
partnerships are not only important at the national level but from an international point of view as
well.
CIAM is a coordinated multi-agency program created in 2002 to support materials research
collaborations and networking efforts between scientists in participating countries. The participating
agencies in 2002 included the National Research Council for Science and Technology of Argentina
(CONICET), the Brazilian National Council for Research (CNPq), the Natural Sciences and
Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Chilean National Commission for Scientific
and Technological Research (CONICYT), the Colombian Institute for the Development of Science
and Technology (COLCIENCIAS), the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology
(CONACYT), and the United States National Science Foundation (NSF). The National Commission
of Science and Technology (NCST) of Jamaica and the National Institute of Higher Education
(NIHERST) of Trinidad and Tobago joined CIAM in 2004.
Twenty-eight collaborative research projects, each involving materials researchers from two or
more of the participating countries, were funded in the first coordinated CIAM competition held in
2002-03. A second coordinated CIAM competition is being held in 2004-05. CIAM has also
supported an inter-American workshop on the frontiers of materials research held in Chile in 2004; a
CIAM grantees conference will be held in Mexico in 2005.
The collaborative materials research projects and workshops sponsored by CIAM serve to
enhance interactions among researchers and to advance materials research in the region. Actions
remain to be taken to strengthen CIAM and make it more inclusive. A proposal to implement mobility
and exchange programs and programs to facilitate remote access to instrumentation is included here.
These programs will promote the involvement in CIAM of countries that lag behind in science and
-2-
technology and are not currently part of the CIAM network, as well as make the collaborative efforts
of those countries already participating in CIAM more effective.
1. Background
Materials are more than mere components of modern tools and devices -the basic properties of
materials frequently define the capabilities, potential, reliability, and limitations of technology itself.
Materials and processes will play an ever increasing role in improving energy efficiency, promoting
environmental protection, lowering health-care costs, developing an information infrastructure, and
providing modern and reliable transportation and civil infrastructure systems. Advances in materials
science and engineering enable progress across a broad range of scientific disciplines and
technological areas with dramatic impacts on society.
Continued progress in materials science and engineering is increasingly dependent upon
collaborative efforts among several different disciplines, as well as closer coordination among
funding agencies and effective partnerships involving universities, industry, and national laboratories.
Because of the interdependence of countries’ national priorities, partnerships are not only important at
the national level but from an international point of view as well.
With this in mind, international workshops were held in May 1995 in Saltillo, Mexico, in June
1998 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and in August 2001 in Cancun, Mexico, to stimulate enhanced
collaborations among materials researchers and create networks linking countries in the Americas.
Scientists and engineers from the Americas participated in the workshops and identified possible
areas for mutually beneficial collaborations. The recommendations that emerged from these
workshops included: identifying and supporting cooperative research projects that leverage the
strengths of each country’s scientific community; the extensive use of electronic communication,
information exchanges, and databases to promote and facilitate research collaborations; and education
activities at the international level. The workshop reports are posted at the International Union of
Materials Research Societies web site, http://www.iumrs.org.
2. Creation of CIAM
In January 2002 representatives from research funding agencies in the Americas met in Brasilia,
Brazil, to explore ways to implement the workshops recommendations. A coordinated multi-agency
program for Inter-American Materials Collaboration (CIAM) was created to support materials
research collaborations and networking efforts between scientists in participating countries. The
participating agencies in 2002 included the National Research Council for Science and Technology of
Argentina (CONICET), the Brazilian National Council for Research (CNPq), the Natural Sciences
and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Chilean National Commission for
Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT), the Colombian Institute for the Development of
Science and Technology (COLCIENCIAS), the Mexican National Council of Science and
Technology (CONACYT), and the United States National Science Foundation (NSF).
-3-
CIAM Activities
a. First Coordinated CIAM Competition
CIAM supports collaborative materials research projects between investigators in the
participating countries in the Americas. Calls for international collaborative research proposals
involving scientists from at least two of the participating countries were issued by the participating
agencies in the third quarter of 2002; they can be found at:
http://www.conicet.gov.ar/coop/convocatoria/CIAM.php
http://www.cnpq.br/servicos/editais/ct/ciam2002.htm
http://www.nserc.ca/intern/int-americ_e.htm
http://www.conicyt.cl/comunicados/2002/comu-julio/cs.materiales.html
http://www.colciencias.gov.co/convocatorias/convocatorias_cod.php?cod=121
http://www.conacyt.mx/dac/convenios/nsf/ConvocCIAMfinal2.htm
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2002/nsf02141/nsf02141.htm
Representatives from the seven participating agencies met in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in April
2003, to compare individual agency proposal evaluations and identify awards. Twenty-eight
collaborative projects were funded in this first CIAM competition (figure).
b. CIAM Scientific Workshops
In April 2004 CIAM sponsored a scientific workshop titled “Frontiers in Materials Research”.
The workshop was held in Viña del Mar, Chile, and was organized by CIMAT (Centro para la
Investigación Interdisciplinaria Avanzada en Ciencias de los Materiales, Chile). Over 140 participants
from seven countries in the continent attended the workshop; about half of them were students. The
workshop web site is http://www.cimat.cl/Conferencia/Frontiers/. CIAM plans to hold a scientific
conference for CIAM grantees to present the results of their collaborative projects in Mexico in 2005.
c. Second Coordinated CIAM Competition
Concurrently with the April 2004 workshop in Viña del Mar, representatives from the seven
countries participating in CIAM met in Santiago de Chile to plan the next coordinated CIAM
competition. Representatives from Costa Rica, Ecuador, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, and Uruguay
also attended this meeting as observers.
The second coordinated CIAM competition will be held in 2004-05. The National Commission
on Science and Technology of Jamaica and the National Institute of Higher Education of Trinidad and
Tobago have joined CIAM. The nine participating countries are issuing new calls for proposals for
the fourth quarter of 2004. Other countries in the Americas not currently participating in CIAM are
encouraged to do so. Representatives from the nine participating countries will meet in Mexico City
in April 2005 to compare individual agency evaluations and identify awards for this second CIAM
competition.
-4-
3. Expansion and Strengthening of CIAM
Much progress has been achieved since CIAM was created in 2002, particularly in enhancing
interactions among materials researchers across the Americas. Yet actions remain to be taken
regarding various aspects of the CIAM network in order for it to effectively promote materials
research in the region. An important factor that affects the impact of CIAM is the uneven level of
participation of various countries, including the complete absence of some. The report of the
workshop on Scientific and Technological Development in the Americas organized by the OAS
Office of Science and Technology in Quito in December 2002 notes the large heterogeneity in the
level of scientific and technological development among the countries in the region. This
heterogeneity in scientific and technological development includes both human capital and physical
infrastructure, and reflects itself in the level of participation in CIAM of the various countries.
The Inter-American Materials Collaboration Programs hereby proposes some actions designed to
promote the involvement in CIAM of countries that lag behind in science and technology and are not
currently part of the CIAM coalition, as well as to make the collaborative efforts of those countries
already participating in CIAM more effective. These actions can have a large impact on CIAM’s
ability to become more effective and more global, for a relatively modest effort.
a. Development of Human Capital: Mobility and Exchange Programs
Technical workshops and summer schools that include participants from all over the region
clearly contribute to the development of interactions between researchers in more and less developed
countries. These meetings are especially good in promoting long-term interactions when they include
the younger generations, which are more mobile and can subsequently participate in extended
exchange programs. Meetings of this nature are already being promoted by CIAM and other
organizations, such as the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy through
the Pan-American Studies Institutes (PASI), and will continue to take place.
Beyond such meetings, where researchers can interact in person over a rather limited period of
time, the implementation of exchange and mobility programs, where researchers spend extended
periods of time, on the order of several months, in other institutions can effectively assist in the
development of human resources. Such programs can support the extended stay of materials
researchers from less developed countries, perhaps both teaching and doing research, in an institution
in a more developed country. Such extended stays could take place, for example, in one of the
centers of excellence in materials research that are emerging through the region, such as the CIMAT
in Santiago de Chile, the Nanosciences Millenium Institutes in Brazil, or the Materials Research
Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC) in the USA, to name a few. Mobility programs of this
type have been successfully implemented in other circumstances, e.g., the International Center for
Theoretical Physics in Trieste.
A mobility and exchange program can also support the extended stay of materials researchers
from a more developed country in an institution in a less developed country to assist, for example, in
the development of a laboratory and/or academic curricula. This latter aspect is very relevant to an
interdisciplinary activity like materials research, where formal academic programs exist only in a few
countries in the region. The researchers could bring with them some of their young associates, thus
contributing to the creation of long-term ties between the program participants. A successful example
of this type of activity that readily comes to mind is the creation in the sixties of the Low Temperature
-5-
Physics Laboratory at the Centro Atómico Bariloche in Argentina, which was made largely possible
by the participation of John Wheatley, from the University of Illinois in the USA, for whom the
Wheatley Award of the American Physical Society, in honor of physicists who have promoted the
development of physics in developing countries, is named.
b. Effective Use of Infrastructure Resources: Remote Access to Instrumentation
The advancement of materials research is strongly tied to the access to sophisticated and
rather expensive instrumentation used to characterize and model the properties of a material, and to
process it. Developments in instrumentation and communications now make remote access to
instrumentation possible. Thus, technological developments present a unique opportunity to
overcome the insurmountable barrier that access to expensive instrumentation often presents to
researchers. A program to facilitate the remote access by researchers in the region, regardless of
where they reside, to instrumentation located in established centers of excellence in materials research
can have a large impact on the progress of materials research across the region. There are already
several centers of excellence in materials research that make some of their instrumentation available
online, such as the MRSECs, supported by the US National Science Foundation, and Oak Ridge
National Laboratory, supported by the US Department of Energy, yet most offer these services on the
basis of joint research projects.
A program in support of access to remote instrumentation can support the acquisition and/or
improvement of local computing and communication resources that may be needed to access the
remote instruments over the web. The program can support remote videoconferences for instruction
on the capabilities and use of the instrumentation. It can leverage on the exchange and mobility
program described above to promote the development of professional collaborations, both in real
space and cyberspace, between researchers in less developed countries and centers of excellence in
materials research with extensive instrumentation facilities.
4. CIAM Contacts
For more information about CIAM please contact any of the following:
Jorge Tezón, jtezon@conicet.gov.ar
Maria Cláudia Miranda Diogo, mdiogo@cnpq.br;
Denis Leclerc, denis.leclerc@nserc.ca;
Ximena Gomez de la Torre Vargas, xgomez@conicyt.cl
Rafael Hurtado, rhurtado@colciencias.gov.co;
Arnold Ventura, aventura@uwimona.edu.jm;
José Lever, jlever@conacyt.mx;
Ramsey Saunders, rsaunders@fans.uwi.tt;
Carmen Huber, chuber@nsf.gov.