International Student Engagement

MURPA 2009 and friends: Left to right: Teri Simas PRAGMA Coordinator UCSD, Aisa Na'im, Andrew Paterson, Jonathan McClure, Ben Morgan and Prof Stephanie Fahey DVC International Monash

Message Lab Director's talk on US-Aust eSci Collab 

PRIME is the Pacific Rim Undergraduate Experience and has led the way for international undergraduate research exchanges and given PRAGMA a sharp focus on student research education. PRAGMA  is the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly. Monash is a very active member and Prof David Abramson the Monash representative at most meetings.

PRIME has spawned the Monash student equivalent MURPA which is the Monash Undergraduate Research Projects Abroad. It started in 2008 by visits to UCSD and is funded by a number of Monash departments and centres and administered by Faculty of IT. Other student and staff research exchanges have involved University of Linz, Oxford University, Cranfield, Brazil Supercomputer Centre. A number of these occurred in 2005-2006 under the Global eScience Grant awarded to University of Queensland and its partner universities under an International Science Linkages(DEST) grant.

PRIME and Global eScience have had strong spin-offs via continued collaborative research, (Nimrod in the main), long after the specific visit and reflected in a series of successful grid experiments, scientific discovery and papers. It is expected that MURPA will follow this pattern as students move into Honours and beyond.

The success of MURPA in its short history has also been recognised by an award from CENIC in the US for Enhancing Student Exchange Experiences with High Definition Video Conference. https://messagelab.monash.edu.au/MURPAProgramRecognised . Another high point is acceptance of a journal paper in 2010, details of which were: Arzberger, P., Wienhausen, G., Abramson, D., Date, S., Lin, F-P., Nan, K. and Shimojo, S., “PRIME: an integrated and sustainable undergraduate international research program”, Advances in Engineering Education, American Society for Engineering Education, Summer 2010, Volume 2, Number 2. https://messagelab.monash.edu.au/PublicationsYear