Master's in Materials Science Powered by Large Scale Facilities

This two-year European Master's programme in Material Science aims to build up a European platform at university level strongly involving "large scale research facilities". The Master's degree is awarded by two out of the six partner universities: Posnan (PL), Rennes 1 (F), Montpellier (F), Torino (I), Technische Universität München (DE), and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (DE). Admission criteria are a BSc degree (or the equivalent – 180 ECTS) in physics, chemistry, geoscience, or materials science, together with a proficient level of scientific English. This Master's course of study aims to promote the scientific collaboration between universities, large scale facilities, and industry. Its main objective is to provide skilled scientific and technological manpower in materials science in order to increase the contribution and use of large scale facilities both for industrial and fundamental research. Students will obtain wide background knowledge in exploring materials with neutrons or synchrotron radiation during a summer school lasting two weeks. State-of-the-art experimental beamline set-ups of spectrometers and diffractometers at synchrotron sources, nuclear reactors as well as on spallation sources will be introduced for different applications. Students should be able to choose the right source and instrumentation with respect to resolution, time-scale, and energy needed for a given scientific problem. Students will also be asked to write their own proposal and to conduct an experiment at large scale facilities. Several important European large scale facilities, such as FRM II (Munich, Germany), PSI (Switzerland), ESRF and ILL (Grenoble, France), LLB (Saclay, France), and DESY (Hamburg, Germany), strongly support this Master's course of study. They will co-organise the summer school and will host students in the second half of their studies to follow research activities previously agreed between a university professor and scientists from the large scale facilities.