Page 21 - UMN Chemnews December 2020

fundamental scientific principles to engage more than 50,000 K-12 students each year. Professor and Chemistry Department Head David Blank serves as MRSEC’s academic adviser to Phil Engen, MRSEC’s Education and Outreach director.
MRSEC is a major supporter of the University’s Energy & U show, which brings more than 12,000 students to campus annu- ally for a dynamic, interactive show focused on the different forms of energy. MRSEC eliminates the financial cost of transportation, which is a barrier for the majority of schools attending, and supports efforts to recruit a majority of diverse students from underrepre- sented groups in the sciences. Professor Aaron Massari, Energy & U director, and Joseph Franek, chemical demonstration director, are also working on a MRSEC Partnership for Research and Education in Materials initia- tive with the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, which is developing an Energy & U show in Spanish that will then be shared with the University of Minnesota.
Partnerships with industry
In addition, MRSEC has interactions with industry that involve knowledge transfer in a pre-competitive collaboration with more than 20 companies. Shared experimental facilities provide access to state-of-the-art materials characterization instrumentation to a national base of more than 500 users.
“Materials are enablers of technologies that directly affect people’s lives,” said Linda Sapochak, Ph.D., director of the NSF Division of Materials Research. “The MRSEC program is a flagship program for the division and with these new awards will continue its long history of forging new discoveries and fueling new technologies.”
NSF’s nationwide MRSEC program provides sustained support of interdisciplinary mate- rials research and education of the highest quality. Founded in 1994, the MRSEC pro- gram traces its roots to the Interdisciplinary Research Laboratories established in 1960. With a program investment of nearly $350 million over six years in emerging fields such as quantum materials, synthetic biology,
and artificial intelligence, MRSECs leverage diverse expertise in areas such as polymers, ceramics, and magnetic nanomaterials to forge new research endeavors driven by a vision of the materials of tomorrow.
Reprinted with permission by the College of Science & Engineering, Communications Director Rhonda Zurn, and augmented with Department of Chemistry-specific information by Chemistry Communications Coordinator Eileen Harvala.
Professor Timothy Lodge
“This funding is a strong affirmation of the high national stature of modern materials research at the University of Minnesota and a testament to the consistently excellent research and outreach carried out by our students, postdocs, faculty, and staff.”
—Regents Professor Timothy Lodge, MRSEC Director
NSF awards $20M to Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology
Department of Chemistry is key partner in the center
THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (NSF)
Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology (CSN), which includes a team of researchers from the Department of Chemistry, has re- ceived a five-year, $20 million grant from the NSF Division of Chemistry.
The grant will allow continued research on evaluating the molecular-level impact of nanotechnology on the environment and living things. The center was initially funded in 2012.
Chemistry Professor Christy Haynes, a leading researcher in the growing field of sustainable nanotechnology, is the center’s associate direc- tor. The multi-institutional research center is based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the direction of Professor Robert Hamers.
“The NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology stimulates my research group to approach scientific problems that we would likely never approach without the large-
scale and long-term financial resources and
collaboration that come with this opportuni- ty,” said Haynes, a University of Minnesota Distinguished McKnight University Professor. “For example, my group now has a significant interest in designing nanomaterials that will controllably chemically transform to release needed micronutrients to agricultural plants, aiming to increase crop yield and impact pro- jected global food supply shortages,” she said.
Chemistry Associate Professor Erin Carlson is a senior researcher within the center. Her
continued on page 22
cse.umn.edu/chem 21