Currently 15 graduate students are studying at the ALMA building in the NAOJ Mitaka Campus. They come from various universities such as the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI) which is an affiliated university of NAOJ and other national institutes and the University of Tokyo where NAOJ researchers are assigned to a teaching position as a faculty member and carry out researches at NAOJ as temporary students.

On November 25, 2015 the NAOJ Chile Observatory held an event to provide the graduate students the opportunity to give presentations on their research progress and results. The presentation was attended by the graduate students and their teachers as well as researchers and research fellows working at the ALMA building. For non-Japanese researchers, presentations and Q&A sessions were given mostly in English.

Among those studying in the NAOJ Chile observatory, there are some students who had a chance to have ALMA observations for their observing proposals, which were prepared with the support of their supervisors and successfully adopted by ALMA. While studying in the Chile Observatory, they also can get support from experts who are familiar with the data analysis of ALMA and conduct their research smoothly. In addition to these, the Chile Observatory provides a lot of support for students as part of the educational effort for graduate students such as regular seminars to learn the basics of radio interferometry, seminars to introduce newly published papers, and ALMA seminars to have presentations of invited researchers on the latest scientific results. The research presentations by graduate students like this are held annually in fall or winter when the first-year master’s degree students start to obtain their research results and the second-year students are about to conclude their master’s thesis.