Six students from the US attended Nagoya University for ten days this summer as part of the UPWARDS for the Future program. UPWARDS (University Partnership for Workforce Advancement and Research & Development in Semiconductors) is an initiative which aims to produce the next generation of human resources in the semiconductor industry. It is supported by the Micron Foundation, Micron Technology, Tokyo Electron, the US National Science Foundation, six US universities and five Japanese universities, of which Nagoya University is one.
The summer program, called the UPWARDS Summer Intensive Program, brought students from the University of Washington, Virginia Tech, Boise State University and Rochester Institute of Technology to Japan.
During the program, the participants visited Nagoya University's semiconductor-related research facilities such as the Institute for Materials and Systems Science (IMaSS), the Center for Integrated Research on Future Electronics (CIRFE) and the Center for Low Temperature Plasma Science (cLPS), took laboratory tours of semiconductor-related laboratories at the Graduate School of Engineering, and attended special lectures and experiments related to wide-gap semiconductors, plasma science, semiconductor nanostructures, and other areas of semiconductor engineering. In addition, students visited Aichi Synchrotron Radiation Center and Denso to learn about Japanese research institutions and the semiconductor industry at large. They also received a special lecture from Professor Emeritus Ryoichi Suematsu on the history of Japanese mechanical engineering, from karakuri dolls to industrial robots.
On the final day of the program, the U.S. students introduced their research and presented their results and impressions of their activities during their stay in the US. At the end of the program, Dean Kobashi of the Graduate School of Engineering awarded certificates to the six participating students. Throughout the program, 17 graduate and undergraduate engineering students from Nagoya University acted as tutors to support the US students and to facilitate international exchange between Japan and the US.
This program provided an opportunity for students from the American universities to get an insight into Japanese research and development, and for Nagoya University students to broaden their horizons and consider their own opportunities to study abroad. As a member of UPWARDS for the Future, Nagoya University will continue accepting students from its US partner universities while sending its own students to the US to deepen Japan-US ties in semiconductor engineering and research. We further aim to facilitate long-term stays at US institutions for our graduate students and researchers, with a particular focus on young and female members of our community.