This summer the Department is hosting three international interns who have come to Canada through the Mitacs Globalink Research Internship program. These students are Abhishek Chaudhary, working with Prof. Giovanni Fanchini, Shyam Menon, working with Prof. Shantanu Basu, and Xiyang Zhang, working with Prof. Sree Ram Valluri.
The Mitacs Globalink Research Internship program is a competitive program for international students from selected countries, currently Australia, Brazil, China, France, India, Germany, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Ukraine. After a detailed process run by Mitacs, selected top-ranked applicants participate in a 12-week research internship under the supervision of a Canadian university faculty member.
Abhishek Chaudhary is currently pursuing a Masters degree in Engineering Physics at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. He is also funded by the German DAAD exchange program. According to Abhishek, “Being a Mitacs intern at Western University has been a very delightful and educational experience for me. My colleagues and supervisor Prof. Fanchini have been very helpful and supportive. I am also thankful for being allowed a certain degree of freedom to structure my internship as per my interests in graphene based solar cells. This research internship has further solidified my interest to pursue a PhD in semiconductor physics.”
Shyam Menon is pursuing a combined Bachelors-Masters degree in Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Varanasi, India. Here he is running large-scale three-dimensional simulations of star formation, stating that “The experience has given me a lot of really good exposure to what it’s like to do research.There’s a lot of good research coming out of Canada now, especially here at Western. In fact, I am thinking about research as a career and doing graduate school in Canada. I would love to come back!”
Xiyang Zhang is an undergraduate student majoring in Statistics in the College of Mathematics, Sichuan University, China. He relates that “I seized an opportunity offered by Mitacs, starting my research project about data mining of gravitational wave data at Western. Here, a kindness toward multiculturalism and a strong academic atmosphere attract me deeply, facilitating my work tremendously.”
These three students are but the latest in a rich history of international interns in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Western. There have been about ten Mitacs intern students in the Department in the last five years, and many others funded by other programs like the German DAAD, the Ontario/Baden-Wuerttemberg exchange program and the Ontario-India exchange program. In the Department, we hope to provide a positive experience of research and all-around support so that these students can pave the way for more exchange students in the future. These students can directly assess for themselves the merits of returning to Western for graduate studies. To this effect, the Mitacs students are also eligible for a Globalink Graduate Fellowship if they intend to return to Canada for graduate studies.
Related: see also this article.
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