NSF grant opens opportunities for UC Merced students in materials research

A group of faculty members at the University of California, Merced (UC Merced) has been awarded a $1 million seed grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to form a research collaborative to expand participation and access to materials research-focused facilities, education, training, and careers.

The Venture for Innovation in Self-assembly and Integration of Optoelectronic Nanostructures (VISION) at UC Merced will work with the Center for Integration of Modern Optoelectronic Materials on Demand (IMOD), an NSF Science and Technology Center (STC) headquartered at the University of Washington and spanning a network of institutions across the nation.

The VISION partnership brings together a multi-disciplinary team from UC Merced and IMOD. At UC Merced, the core members of the VISION team are professors Michael Scheibner, Sayantani Ghosh, and Hui Cai with the Department of Physics, Tao Ye with the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Mehmet Baykara with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, as well as several others. The IMOD team features researchers from the University of Washington, the University of Colorado Boulder, the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, the University of Pennsylvania, and Lehigh University.

Together, they will develop a program that cultivates student potential in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. They will offer enriched research opportunities, transdisciplinary scientific collaboration, pedagogical development and inclusive mentoring.

The three-year seed grant will fund a teacher training component to help K-14 educators and graduate students integrate contemporary materials science into diverse classrooms, fostering early enthusiasm and confidence to explore STEM topics, along with other efforts.

Scheibner, the principal investigator, is leading the effort and said this seed grant is funding the foundation of an NSF Partnership for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) center on campus, focused on increasing diversity among the materials science and engineering community.

“We are creating pathways by giving students experiential learning opportunities that will allow them to learn about modern materials, and also to try out career trajectories, whether it’s at our campus or partnering universities, national labs or in industry,” Scheibner said. “We aspire to be a stepping stone for students into the exciting world of materials, starting at very early ages.”

In addition to outreach to younger students, VISION will offer hands-on research opportunities and mentoring for undergraduate and graduate students, train faculty members in culturally responsive mentoring, and expand materials science and engineering research.

“Starting in the spring, we will offer fellowships to undergraduate students because we want to enable them to get involved in the research projects we and IMOD are working on, including DNA-guided nano-assemblies of colloidal quantum dots for quantum light generation and light manipulation,” Scheibner said. “We plan to select up to eight research fellows each semester.”

The fellows will be part of transdisciplinary projects that involve several faculty members from both the schools of Engineering and Natural Sciences at UC Merced.

VISION and IMOD have also planned an exchange program for faculty and graduate students so they can build research collaborations and learn from each other. IMOD comprises several universities, and the exchange could include any of them.

This seed grant award allows the VISION partnership to compete for full six-year multimillion-dollar PREM awards.

If they are awarded full PREM funding, they plan to greatly increase the number of undergraduates and graduates they work with, as well as offering immersive programs for younger students.

This year, NSF gave out more than $50 million across 15 minority-serving institutions, with awards of more than $4 million going to each of 11 schools.

“Supporting the scientific talent present in every community in our country is imperative to strengthening the nation’s materials research infrastructure, which is central to everything from semiconductors to medical implants,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan.