Summer Workshop on Radio Astrophysics, Tonantzintla 2017

The “Summer Workshop on Radio Astrophysics, Tonantzintla 2017″ will introduce the topic of Radio Astrophysics to students in the last year of careers in Physics, Astronomy, Engineering, and related fields. The registration will be open to students from Mexican and Central/South American institutions. Our main motivation to promote this specific area is the recent beginning of scientific operation by a new generations of mm-wavelength facilities (e.g. ALMA and the Large Millimeter Telescope, LMT). Particularly, INAOE is currently responsible for the operation of the 50m-LMT, the largest single-dish telescope optimized for observations at mm-wavelengths (1mm), installed in México in collaboration with the U. of Massachusetts, USA. The workshop is divided in two sections: a first week with lectures presenting the fundamental concepts of radioastronomy, and a second week where each student develops a short project supervised by researchers from the Astrophysics Department of INAOE and, mostly, using LMT data. To address technical aspects of the lectures and support some of the instrumentation projects, we use the 5m historic antenna of the Millimeter Wave Observatory, donated by the U. of Texas to INAOE. A visit to the LMT is included as part of the workshop. For our latest workshop (summer 2016) we received more than 60 applications from highly qualified students. Fifteen students from different states in Mexico and Central/South America (see: www.inaoep.mx/~tallermmtnt) were accepted to attend the workshop. Unfortunately, costs for transportation had to be covered by the students. Our goal for next 2017 summer workshop at Tonantzintla, México, is to receive 20 students from Latin America with IAU grants to cover their transportation and insurance.