The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is an international organisation that performs non-military fundamental research on the Franco-Swiss border close to Geneva. Since 1954, its model for cooperation, has become a shining example of international collaboration world-wide bringing together 10,000 top-notch physicists, engineers and computer scientists from over 500 institutions of over 100 countries. It is the largest laboratory of its kind in the world and it currently runs the largest and most powerful scientific instrument ever constructed by mankind; a particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The LHC is 27 km long and is like a giant microscope intended to understand better the laws of nature, particularly the composition of matter and the forces that act on it. It is a scientific colossus which started in 1982 and was launched in 2008. It not only is a scientific and political challenge but a financial one too: in total the LHC costs around 7.5 billion Euros. This cutting edge technology is having profound implications in physics, engineering, computing and medicine ranging from the infinitely small (nanotechnology) to the infinitely large (cosmology).
Through a collaboration between CERN and the University of Malta, Masters and Ph.D. scholarships are being made available to graduates and final year students of mechanical and electrical engineering, Computer Engineering, Physics and Mathematics. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be part of a project with Nobel laureates and top-notch scientists and engineers with access to unprecedented research resources. Beyond the outstanding first-class scientific value of the research projects, the selected students will find collaborating in a multidisciplinary and multicultural environment an extremely enriching personal experience. There are no pre-requisite modules for application.
Interested students are to send their CV and draft transcript (including yearly grade averages) by email to nicholas.sammut@um.edu.mt by Thursday 16 February 2017.
