Proceedings of 20 th International Congress on Acoustics, ICA 2010 23-27 August 2010, Sydney, Australia ICA 2010 1 EAA Summer Schools Luigi Maffei (1), Michael Vorländer (2), U. Peter Svensson (3) and Kristian Jambrošić (4) (1) 2nd University of Naples, Italy (2) RWTH Aachen University, Germany (3) NTNU Trondheim, Norway (4) University of Zagreb, Croatia PACS: 43.10.Sv ABSTRACT EAA Summer Schools are an integral part of the Young Acousticians Programme in the European Acoustics Asso- ciation. They consist of various courses at an advanced level, taught by internationally recognized and distinguished experts in acoustics, and they are integrated into a European regional conference. Furthermore, structured sessions of the conference are related to the summer school courses, thus connecting basic lectures to keynotes and other invited papers on advanced topics. Those sessions are co-chaired by one experienced expert and one young acoustician, typi- cally a doctoral student. The first EAA Summer School will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in September 2010 with short courses on Soundscape, Voice and Musical Acoustics, Building Acoustics, Hydroacoustics, Numerical Meth- ods, Psychoacoustics and Ultrasound. In the presentation we will illustrate the background and the motivation of this initiative. Content, organization and future plans of integration into the European higher education in acoustics are discussed. INTRODUCTION The European Acoustics Association (EAA) was established in 1992. Members are societies in European countries that are interested in the objectives of the EAA. The objectives of EAA are to promote and spread the science of acoustics, its technologies and applications throughout Europe and the entire world. The EAA gathers 30 societies of acoustics and serves more than 9000 individual members all over Europe. The European Acoustics Association has created various initiatives for supporting and promoting students and young acousticians. The EAA Young Acousticians Programme was started in 2005 and extended recently. The first component was the Grant for East European students for participation in the main EAA conferences FORUM ACUSTICUM and EURONOISE. Later, in 2009, the EAA board and Executive Council dis- cussed an extension of this approach to students from all countries and to a more general scheme. “Students” in this respect are young acousticians on the Master or PhD level, typically not older than 35 years. The following elements are combined in this concept:  20 Student Grants for conference participation in EAA conferences,  Best paper / Best Poster Award for student papers and posters at EAA conferences,  Supporting students in finding courses and internships in acoustics and providing information on funds (via the Web-based university guide of EAA: SCHOLA), The Young Acousticians Programme includes also a service for networking of the members. A networking platform is integrated in the website of the EAA, FENESTRA (www.european-acoustics.net). This way, interested groups such as students on Master and PhD levels communicate on various topics related to their higher education. Questions, discussions and information are collected and forwarded with regard to scientific problems, contacts with companies, insti- tutions and laboratories, and to possible sources of funding for internships or exchange programmes. Furthermore, with the introduction of a new type of EAA event, EUROREGIO as an additional feature of European regional conferences, the young Acousticians programme was amended by the component of “Summer Schools”, offer- ing specific courses on hot topics in acoustics. EUROREGIO CONFERENCES There are plenty of conferences on acoustics in Europe. Usu- ally national acoustical societies organize their annual meet- ings, some of which are of a large size. United Kingdom with focused IoA conferences in spring and autumn, France with the biannual CFA meeting, Germany with the annual DAGA conference, are examples of such events. In the 1990s EAA added the triannual FORUM ACUSTICUM and the EURONOISE conferences. Just inventing another EAA event, however, would not be reasonable, since the conflict with too many national and regional meetings would be ob- vious. EUROREGIO is not a new conference added to the calendar, but an expression of European support for traditional regional