  The Escaramujo Project was a series of eight hands-on laboratory courses on
High Energy Physics and Astroparticle Instrumentation, in Latinamerican
Institutions. The Physicist Federico Izraelevitch traveled on a van with his
wife and dogs from Chicago to Buenos Aires teaching the courses. The sessions
took place at Institutions in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador,
Peru and Bolivia at an advanced undergraduate and graduate level. During these
workshops, each group built a modern cosmic ray detector based on plastic
scintillator and silicon photomultipliers, designed specifically for this
project. After the courses, a functional detector remained at each institution
to be used by the faculty to facilitate the training of future students and to
support and enable local research activities. The five-days workshops covered
topics such as elementary particle and cosmic ray Physics, radiation detection
and instrumentation, low-level light sensing with solid state devices,
front-end analog electronics and object-oriented data analysis (C++ and ROOT).
Throughout this initiative, about a hundred of talented and highly motivated
young students were reached. With the detector as a common thread, they were
able to understand the designing principles and the underlying Physics involved
in it, build the device, start it up, characterize it, take data and analyze
it, mimicking the stages of a real elementary particle Physics experiment.
Besides the aims to awaken vocations in science, technology and engineering,
The Escaramujo Project was an effort to strengthen the integration of
Latinamerican academic institutions into the international scientific
community.
