CIAM: Colaboración Inter-Americana en Materiales
(Inter-American Materials Collaboration)
Executive Summary
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 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.
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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
3.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
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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).
3.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.
3.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. 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
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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. We hereby propose 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.
4.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 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.
4.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
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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.
5. 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.
CIDI01323E01
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