Department of Education Awards $192,000 Grant for Student Exchange Between the U.S. and Europe

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The Fund for the Improvement of Post-secondary Education in the U.S. Department of Education has awarded a four-year, $192,000 grant to the department of mathematical sciences at the University of Arkansas for mathematics students at the master’s and doctoral levels to study at a consortium of U.S. and European institutions.

The United States consortium includes the University of Arkansas as the lead institution, along with Temple University and the University of Pittsburgh. The European consortium includes the University of Bologna in Italy as the lead institution, the Université Paris VII Diderot in France, the Université de Rennes in France and the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain. The project will involve 24 U.S. students and 24 European students over four years. The exchange will be for one semester, typically four months, during which time the visiting students will take graduate-level mathematics courses at the visiting institutions.

“The exchange program is a first step towards establishing a ‘global curriculum’ in the fields of mathematical analysis and partial differential equations,” said Luca Capogna, project director for participating U.S. universities, which have all committed funds for students participating in the program.

The Fund for the Improvement of Post-secondary Education was founded in 1972 with a dual mission to improve both the quality and the accessibility of education beyond the high school level. Projects receiving grants from the fund are intended to provide the seed capital for experiments in educational reform.

The European partners are funded by the Directorate General for Education and Culture of the European Commission.