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This MRSEC supports a broad interdisciplinary research program that investigates the mechanical properties of crystalline and glassy materials at scales intermediate between atomistic and continuum, focuses on and exploits microfluidics to develop novel materials, and explores innovative ways to make stimuli-responsive active materials by self-assembly of soft materials. The MRSEC operates a broad education and outreach research program that includes summer research experiences for undergraduates and teachers, activities for K-12 students, and programs to enhance the participation of members of underrepresented groups in science and engineering at the graduate, postgraduate level, and faculty levels. 

This multifaceted MRSEC enables important areas of future technology, ranging from applications of electrical control over materials to scale-invariant shape-filling amphiphile network self-assembly. The UMN MRSEC manages an extensive program in education and career development. The MRSEC is bolstered by a broad complement of over 20 companies that contribute directly to IRG research through intellectual, technological, and financial support. International research collaborations and student exchanges are pursued with leading research labs in Asia and Europe.

The LRSM at UPENN is a center of excellence for materials research and education. It facilitates collaboration between researchers from different disciplines including physics, chemistry, engineering, and biology to advance transformative scientific projects and solve societal challenges.

The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Columbia University investigates ways of forming films containing complex metal oxide nanoparticles and the properties of these films through an interdisciplinary and collaborative effort. The Center is composed of a single interdisciplinary research group (IRG). The focus of the IRG research is the materials chemistry of oxide nanoparticle systems, and includes nanoparticle synthesis, assembly, and diagnostics. The Columbia MRSEC links thirteen faculty members from five departments on campus with other faculty at City College of New York, and with fourteen collaborators in industry and at national laboratories. The MRSEC maintains shared experimental facilities that meet the needs of the Center research and serve for the training of students. Education outreach efforts of the MRSEC include a summer research experience for undergraduates and for high school teachers, and an extensive visitation program to high and middle schools in New York City that brings materials demonstrations to teachers and students.

Participants in the Center currently include 13 senior investigators, 3 postdoctoral associates, 8 graduate students, 10 undergraduate students and 1 support personnel. Professor Irving P. Herman directs the MRSEC.

Transformative advances occur when new types of material organization and behavior are conceived, created, and controlled. The Penn State Center for Nanoscale Science creates four interdisciplinary research groups (IRGs) to meet this goal. The IRG1 team predicts, synthesizes and develops layered materials that couple together electrical, magnetic and mechanical properties in new ways with potential application in cell phones, high-power electronic devices, nonvolatile memory, ultrasound, and precision actuation. In IRG2, self-powered active materials are developed to sense and react to the environment through their collective behavior, capturing key elements of biological behavior in abiotic systems with potential application in biomedicine, diagnostics and sensors, and autonomous materials repair. IRG3 is pioneering the development of electronic metalattices, systems that organize materials in three dimensions on a few-nanometer length scale through innovative high-pressure synthesis, with unique electronic, optical, magnetic and thermal properties. In IRG4, light is used to modulate the controlled, reconfigurable assembly of diverse arrays of nanoparticles purposefully designed to harbor unique collective electronic and optical properties for new types of optical devices and bioinspired sensing. This cohesive culture of shared science is then extended to educate and inspire future scientists and members of the public, bring advances to market through industrial outreach, and reach the wider community through international collaboration and facilities networks. Hands-on materials-oriented kits, smartphone apps, summer science camps, and programs to support students from diverse backgrounds reach thousands of students each year. Researchers at all career stages will be instilled with a native expectation that materials research naturally reaches across disciplines and is open to individuals with diverse backgrounds.

The goal of our interdisciplinary team is to establish the basic science for how strainscapes (combinations of anisotropic strain, strain gradients and interfacial heterostrain) may be used to manipulate the flow of charge, spin, and energy across length scales.

Developing resilient soft materials optimized for load-bearing and toughness is a long-standing challenge which, if solved, could enable the design of advanced resins, fabrics, packages, separation technologies, and tissue replacements. Inspired by the graded and hierarchical s tructures of natural marine materials, this IRG aims to (i) develop new strategies for materials processing that integrate precise, discrete polymer chemistries with non-equilibrium processing methods to achieve controlled multi•phase and interfacial structure, (ii) understand the interactions and mechanics of internal interfaces in these materials, and (iii) establish the multiscale structure-property relationships to provide the foundational design rules for creating new classes of versatile, multi phase soft materials.

Senior Investigators: J. M. Kikkawa & I.-W. Chen IRG Leaders; D. A. Bonnell, P. K. Davies, A. M. Rappe, J. M. Vohs IRG-5 focuses on creating & understanding novel hierarchical interfacial oxide materials. By juxtaposing oxides at various length scales, responsive instabilities appear at their interfaces & give rise to new functionality. This team has expertise in theory, synthesis, & experiment, tailored to studying these instabilities. Quantitative schstronges for modeling ferroelectrics (pioneered in the IRG), predict exciting effects between atomic layers of magnetoresistive & ferroelectric oxides and possible oxide applications to microfluidics.