Physics Comment Magazine March 2018 Issue Physics Comment March 2018_v1.3 | Page 40

The African School of Electronic Structure Methods and Applications (ASESMA) ASESMA is a series of schools held every two years in different sub-Saharan countries, designed to foster a collaborative network for research within Africa in the areas of computational materials science and allied disciplines, including computational chemistry and increasingly now computational biology. Participants are drawn from across the continent through a competitive process, and the lecturers and mentors are outstanding scientists from across the world including Africa. ASESMA is sponsored for the years 2010 to 2020 by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) as a joint mission of the Commissions on Physics Development, Computational Physics, Physics Education and the Structure and Dynamics of Condensed Matter, and it is supported by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, the National Institute for Theoretical Physics, the U.S. Liaison Committee for IUPAP, the American Physical Society and as well as a number of international organizations. The core guiding principle is that computation makes it possible for world-class research to be done with modest investment, and it is an essential part of education for the future. The skills acquired are useful for teaching at the university level and are transferable to other disciplines. The participants are the teachers who will educate future generations of African scientists. The focus of ASESMA is computational methods and applications of electronic structure, chosen because it is an important field that is narrow enough to build up a network for joint work and collaboration, yet broad enough to span the range from fundamental physics to applications in materials science, chemistry, biology and many other fields. In each workshop, participants learn the basic theory and computational methods with hands-on computing, and each participant is involved in a project in an area of current research that can be continued after the school. The main applications are to materials that are crucial for many areas of technology, including solar energy and the vast reserves of minerals and materials mined in Africa. The next ASESMA school will take place 22 October to 2nd November 2018 at the Addis Ababa Science and Technology University. A conference immediately before ASESMA is planned, namely the Ethiopian Regional Workshop on Solar Energy and Energy Storage Technologies: Materials, System Design, and Applications, supported by ICTP. The call for ASESMA has not opened yet. The application process will be administered by ICTP. In the meantime, for financial planning purposes, there is a need to estimate the number of participants from South Africa (senior doctoral students, post docs and young faculty) who are interested in attending ASESMA2018. If you are interested, please write to Prof Nithaya Chetty ([email protected]) to express your interest in participating, together with a brief explanation of your interest. This does not preclude the requirement that you apply formally through the ICTP when the call is made, as this will be followed by a competitive selection process. 40 | P a g e