By Dave Ottalini and Monette Austin Bailey

Members of the Hands-On team go over their equipment before August’s trip to Cameroon. From left, doctoral student Bhargava Ravoori, Professor Rajarshi Roy (slightly hidden), doctoral student Shelby Wilson, Professor Brian Hunt and doctoral student Adam Cohen.Photos by Dave Ottalini

A team of Maryland professors and graduate students is headed to Africa next month to show scientists there how serious, valuable research can be done inexpensively.

In their third annual installment of the “Hands-On Research in Complex Systems Schools Program,” physics Professor Rajarshi Roy and mathematics Professor Brian Hunt will head to the University of Buea in Cameroon with doctoral students Adam Cohen, Bhargava Ravoori and Shelby Wilson to oversee experiments in such fields as cell dynamics, infectious disease and mathematical modeling.

Thanks to portable computers, digital cameras, sound cards and other electronics, they can prepare and operate a variety of experiments for less than $1,000.

“The idea is not to take established experiments that cost $100,000 and try to reduce the cost by using different instrumentation,” says Roy, director of Maryland’s Institute for Physical Science and Technology. “Our goal here is to think of significant and interesting new science that can be done with low-cost instrumentation that has become accessible to people all over.”

Semiconductor lasers, digital signal processing cards and fiber optics will be used in the session on the dynamics of nonlinear optical devices and time-delayed systems.

The program is sponsored by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy (in association with the Italian government and the United Nations), and brings faculty and graduate students from around the world for two weeks. Groups of four to five participants and two instructors work on new tools, do classroom demonstrations and work in teaching laboratories. In the past two years, the program has gone to India and Brazil.

“We wanted to do a program in an African nation. It will be interesting to see how we need to adapt our program to work in different circumstances and environments on the three continents,” says Roy. “The Hands-On program is an experiment itself. A major goal is to learn about science, technology and education around the world. What are the universal challenges, what problems are unique in certain environments?”

Roy says that beyond learning, the program creates relationships. “Each time, we come away with many new friends and scientific collaborators, and keep in touch with them over the years.”

Of his students, he says, “I hope they come away with the joy of cooperatively working together to solve interesting problems, engaging with people we would not normally meet here, and learning how they live and learn in their environments.”

The team will go to Shanghai in 2012, with other trips to Central or South America or the Caribbean planned within the next six years.

“We want to get folks excited about doing experiments and observing nature and to see that this is becoming possible in increasingly ‘quantitative’ ways every day,” says Roy. “Capturing the imagination of young people and helping them see that a lot more is possible than they may have originally assumed is a big goal in developed as well as developing countries.”

Learn more about Hands-On Research, listen to members of the team talk about their previous experience with the  program and what is planned for the Cameroon trip, at newsdesk.umd.edu/global/release.cfm?ArticleID=2189