Context and objectives The development of nanotechnologies and their dissemination in the daily life of citizens suffers from technological bottlenecks like the lack of maturity of mass production processes at the nanoscale. However, the development of innovative techniques and the blooming of new paradigms of production is so spectacular that probably in a very near future, the main cause of the slowing-down of this economic sector will probably shift from technological to human resource limitations. Indeed, it appears to be of strategical importance to educate a large number of young engineers and scientists to these new technologies. In Napa project, training and education activities will be implemented in order to strengthen the educational structures (universities, engineering schools …) for the initial formation of young technologists as well as other structures for training already active engineers, technicians or scientists in the area of Nanopatterning and Applications. The main objective will be to attract young people that exhibit less and less natural attraction for “hard” science to this new cross-disciplinary domain. We want to implement new formations that will contribute to create new specializations in anticipation of the strong demand of the next decade in this sector of activity. Another ambition will be to progressively transform the poor image of technology in the academic community towards a cross-disciplinary scientific area, where both fundamental knowledge and good engineering must be assembled.

Courses Among NaPa partners, the information gathering exercise concerning courses on and or directly relevant to Nanopatterning resulted in returns from 11 partners. These partners offer 42 courses in total. The courses are at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, sometimes fee-paying and sometimes free of charge.The courses come from the following disciplines: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering.They cover a knowledge based spanning from materials science (nanoparticles, polymers), through semiconductor physics, supramolecular chemistry, electronics and optoelectronics, instrumentation, electronic engineering methods, micro- and nano-structuring and up to device realization and testing.

Practical Courses In addition to these conventional lectures, one ambition of the project will be to implement practical courses on nanofabrication. Indeed, as in NAPA project we develop low cost nanofabrication procedure, it appears possible to optimize a robust process of nanofabrication that does not require heavy infrastructures and that could be easily implemented in various universities and engineering schools.

The concept of summer schools dedicated to nanopatterning and applications has been selected as the main tool for training actively young scientists in the domains relevant to NAPA project. NAPA will organise PANAMA schools “PAtterning at the NAnoscale – Methods and Applications”. The format is a small school (24 students), combining one week of practical training on Emerging Nanopatterning Methods and one week of magisterial courses on Nanopatterning, Applications in Industry and Ethical and Societal Issues. The first PANAMA school will take place in Toulouse (France) - July 04-15, 2005.