A visit from the University of Twente

Earlier this month, 26 students and two professors from the University of Twente (UT) visited UBC. Located in Enschede, the Netherlands, UT is home to such facilities as the Max Planck Center for Complex Fluid Dynamics and the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, one of the largest and top-ranked nanotechnology research institutes in the world.

Comprised of final-year undergraduate and Master’s students from the university’s Applied Physics program (the equivalent of UBC’s Engineering Physics program), the student group was on campus as part of a three-week, UT-supported trip along the West Coast of the United States and Canada. They were visiting several companies and universities in hopes of broadening their educational and professional horizons.

As chronicled on their website, the students’ trip would take them to UBC, TRIUMF and Simon Fraser University, as well as to Boeing, IBM, Google, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their visit to UBC was co-organized by professors Anthony Wachs (CHBE/Math) and Ian Frigaard (MECH/Math) of the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory and by Jasmine Chipman Koty of the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (QMI).

After spending the morning of July 8 with the Fluids group, who delivered a 90-minute presentation about the research activities conducted in the lab, the Dutch delegation toured various facilities on campus. These included the Civil and Mechanical Engineering Structures Lab (also known as the “Rusty Hut”), where Frigaard’s group provided a demonstration of flow loops, and the Pulp and Paper Centre (PPC), where CHBE professor and PPC director Mark Martinez offered a review of the work being carried out there.
 
In the afternoon, George Sawatzky (Physics/Chemistry) hosted the UT group at QMI. After presenting on correlated electrons, angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and 2-D materials research, Sawatzky showed the group onsite facilities such as the ARPES lab and the UBC-Moore Centre for Ultrafast Quantum Matter. And that evening, to wind down the busy day, the Dutch team gathered with members of QMI and the Fluids group for a BBQ on sunny Locarno Beach.

Joined by Mechanical Engineering head Steve Feng and Mathematics head Philip Loewen, the guests socialized and discussed graduate student opportunities offered by UBC. Several of the UT students were exploring the possibility of joining UBC as grad students or Visiting International Research Students, and given the positive experience they said they had that day — both academically and socially — some of them may very well return to campus before long.

See more images from the BBQ are available.