Each year, four summer schools, each lasting ten days will be held in four member states between 2005 and 2008. Each year, this school will provide forty young researchers (thirty fully funded by the EU) with insights into the similarities and differences between natural and manufactured materials. In particular these Summer Schools will help early career researchers overcome the fragmentation in observational techniques, experimental procedures, theoretical developments and simulation techniques that have thus far developed in parallel, but in relative isolation, amongst the disparate materials science communities. Having actively participated in this summer school, these researchers will become confident in drawing upon and incorporating developments from across the entire materials community, regardless of whether the information relates to natural or manufactured systems.

Each year world-class researchers from all domains of materials science will be brought together to cross the boundaries between research streams. The syllabus will use an integrated approach to materials, moving away from a tightly focused, materials-specific approach to the idea of a Materials Knowledge Lattice, where the three axes of Scale, Approach and Material encourage a cross-linked foundation for future research.

In order to provide a wider access to researchers in the European Union, to showcase the research skills of the participants and to capture the training materials prepared by the invited speakers, the teaching materials developed for this course will become available as a continuing Web Portal and CD-Rom resource from 2006. Each year the summer schools will focus on one class of problems, so that by the end of the series of comprehensive and integrated online resource will have been created that will provide the wider research community and non-technical audiences insight into this subject, which is of recognised importance to the future of the European Union.