PRIME
PRIME - Pacific Rim Undergraduate Experiences
In the past five years, more than 70 UCSD undergraduates have taken part in the Pacific Rim Experiences for Undergraduates program 
. PRIME provides students with the opportunity of doing real research while living for nine weeks in one of several Pacific Rim countries, from Australia to Taiwan. Students are paired with mentors at both the host institution and at UC San Diego.
"We are immersing the students in both scientific research and a new culture by providing them with experiential training in both the conduct of research and in the international global workplace," explained Gabriele Wienhausen, the principal investigator of PRIME. Wienhausen is the associate dean of education for the UCSD Division of Biological Sciences.
A Calit2 newsletter recently described the healthy state of PRIME as follows
San Diego, CA, June 23, 2008 -- A record number of students from the University of California, San Diego are en route to research institutions around the Pacific Rim as part of a program that lets them spend the summer doing hands-on research into cyberinfrastructure and its uses.
The 21 students – 50 percent larger than last year’s class – are part of the Pacific Rim Experiences for Undergraduates (PRIME) program. Now in its fifth year, PRIME receives primary funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and additional support from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and host institutions.
This year’s class of PRIME students will work alongside faculty, staff and student researchers at host institutions in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, China and Malaysia. Up to this year, all of the institutions are affiliated with PRIME’s parent organization, the NSF-funded Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA), a group of leading Pacific Rim research organizations collaborating on advancing grid technology applications. This year’s host institutions include: Osaka University, Japan; the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Computer Network Information Center (CNIC) in Beijing, China; Monash University in Melbourne, Australia; Taiwan’s National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE); Taiwan’s National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC); the Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia; as well as the University of Waikato and the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Background on the 2008 visit by UCSD students to Monash is on the link below:
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