The Italian Summer Students Program at Fermilab and other US Laboratories

Since 1983 the Italian groups of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and Italian Universities collaborating with Fermilab have been running a two-month summer training program for Italian university students. While in the first year the program involved only three physics students of the University of Pisa, in the following years it was extended to engineering students. This extension was very successful and the engineering students have been since then extremely well accepted by the Fermilab groups. Over the many years of its existence, this program has proven to be the most effective way to engage new students in Fermilab endeavours. Many students have extended their collaboration with Fermilab with their Master’s Thesis and PhD. Since 2004 the program has been supported in part by DOE in the frame of an exchange agreement with INFN. Over its 40 years of history, the program has grown in scope and size and has involved almost 650 Italian students from more than 20 Italian Universities. Moreover, several Institutes of Research, including ASI and INAF in Italy, and the ISSNAF Foundation in the US, have provided additional financial support to extend this program beyond Fermilab. Each intern is supervised by a Fermilab Mentor responsible for performing the training program. Training programs spanned from CDF, CMS, Muon (g-2), Mu2e, MicroBooNE, Icarus, SBND and DUNE design and experimental data analysis, development of particle detectors (silicon trackers, calorimeters, drift chambers, neutrino and dark matter detectors), design of electronic and accelerator components, development of infrastructures and software for exascale data handling, research on superconductive elements and on accelerating cavities, and theory of particle accelerators. Since 2010, within an extended program supported by the Italian Space Agency, a total of more than 30 students in physics, astrophysics, and engineering have been hosted for two months in the summer at US space science Research Institutes and laboratories. In 2015 the University of Pisa created the Summer School "Summer Student at Fermilab and other US Laboratories" to include this program within its educational programs.