IFT/UAM starts an exchange programme with the University of Cape Town benefitting staff, PhD, Masters and undergraduate students

In the frame of the Alliance4Universities network, from which UAM is one of the founders members, together with other three Spanish institutions, the Department of Theoretical Physics UAM - Theoretical Physics Institute IFT and the University of Cape Town have developed an Erasmus+ exchange programme since earlier this year. The programme allows for staff members to give graduate one-week courses at the receiving institution and PhD and Masters students from both institutions to spend a maximum of five months at the receiving institutions to do research and attend courses respectively. Concerning undergraduates, they will be able to complete a full academic year in the host institution under the same conditions as the well-known Erasmus programme.

The programme implementation was boosted by a visit in 2015 by Matilde Chautón (UAM International Relations Office) to South Africa and Dr. Alvaro de la Cruz Dombriz (Mathematics & Applied Mathematics Department, UCT) interest in developing such a collaboration. Since then, two faculty members of UCT (Prof. Peter Dunsby and Dr. Dombriz) have been awarded with the mobility to give graduate courses at UAM and four PhD and Masters students from UCT will visit UAM in 2017 to either do research on co-supervised projects or follow some courses in the prestigious UAM Master programme on Theoretical Physics, respectively. Undergraduate students could spend one academic year in the receiving institution under the same conditions as the well-known Erasmus programme.

On the UAM side, Prof. Juan García-Bellido (IFT/UAM) has given a 10-hour course at Cosmology and Gravity Group of UCT between Nov 21 and Nov 25 2016 under the title "From the Early Universe to the nature of Dark Matter and the origin of Gravitational Waves". The course has been well attended by both faculty, postdocs, PhD and Masters students. Moreover, the lectures are available online at the YouTube UCT Cosmology channel.

We expect more UAM and UCT scientists to benefit from this programme, bringing together two of the leading research institutions in the fields of Cosmology and Theoretical physics.