Nano colleagues, As you are likely aware, Purdue has recently signed an agreement with Colombia which provides funding for PhD fellowships at Purdue. The initial targeted areas are "nanotechnology" and "biotechnology". Student from Colombia will be able to apply for the fellowships in the next few months, then apply for Fall 2012 admission to Purdue PhD programs . The fellowship program will be competitive within Colombia, and students will need to go through the usual application process at Purdue (and meet our usual standards for admission). The attached memo describes the fellowship program, as well as a "junior investigator" program. Note that it also describes some of the ways that we would like for you to be involved, should you choose to participate. The areas of involvement reflect the mutual desire to develop a sustainable program that benefits both Purdue and Colombia in the long term. In the short term, we would like to establish research partnerships with faculty in Colombia. In the longer term, the desire is to have opportunities for Colombian students to return to Colombia after their PhD, either in academia or corporate R&D labs. At this point, we are asking interested faculty to provide a profile for the web page (contact info and brief description of research interests). The profiles will be a means for Colombian students to identify appropriate faculty, and to contact the faculty in order to define a research proposal (to include in fellowship application). This will be a first step in defining the important advisor/student relationship. We were part of the Purdue team that visited top universities in Colombia in March, and have agreed to serve as points of contact for the nano effort. We met many faculty who are performing high quality research, in many cases without ready access to state-of-the-art equipment. We can provide context and feedback regarding the quality of various universities. Please contact us if you have any questions. Thank you, David Janes and Monica Allain