This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program offers a nationally unique, comprehensive package of new and tested approaches to graduate education in materials chemistry and physics. It is designed to prepare the next generation of graduate students for the challenges of an increasingly interdisciplinary and rapidly evolving research and development arena. The research and education activities of this IGERT program are unified by the study of structure/property relations in the increasingly important class of materials that have properties dominated by critical length scales that lie between those of bulk materials and molecular species. Three established research thrusts are aimed at developing and understanding such materials: (1) the synthesis and properties of nanolaminates and functionally graded materials; (2) the preparation and study of electronic and optical meso- and nano- structures; and (3) the design and investigation of molecularly engineered assemblies and materials. Each of these on-going research topics provides outstanding opportunities for interdisciplinary graduate training because the chemistry, physics, and engineering of short length scale systems are closely intertwined. A diverse group of students and scientists from the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Portland State University and a range of other industrial and academic partners are brought together in an effort to enhance graduate training and materials research. Five key program elements interspersed in the graduate program are designed to accelerate the transition from student to scientist. These include summer immersion programs, laboratory rotations in chemistry and physics at the participating institutions, a Technology Entrepreneur Fellows program teaming IGERT trainees with MBA and law students, regular research thrust seminars, and internships in industry, academia, or a national laboratory. These program elements are designed to accelerate the transition from passive learner to scientist by training students in group-based problem solving, helping students acquire technical and time management skills and challenging them to complete a project related to a research thrust area. The program elements described above are expected to decrease time to degree, expand research opportunities through collaborations with the participating institutions, and enhance recruitment of excellent students including members of groups underrepresented in science and engineering. The connections established by the program will have a substantial impact on the Pacific Northwest region in particular, through the education of a workforce commensurate with its large concentration of high-technology industry. The research and education collaborations formed will strengthen the scientific basis to build nanoscience infrastructure accessible to academic and industrial partners within the framework of the statewide Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute. The IGERT educational program is integrated with other NSF program such as GK-12 and REU. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.
developed a nationally unique, comprehensive education package to prepare the next generation of graduate students for the challenges of an increasingly interdisciplinary and rapidly evolving research and development arena in the area of materials. Our IGERT program decreased time to degree, expanded research opportunities through collaborations and enhanced the career opportunities of participating graduate students. These program elements are now mainstreamed as part of our graduate program in chemistry. This project catalyzed several key elements that were found to accelerate the transition from student to scientist, including: • Targeted internships in industry, academia or a national laboratory which develop and expand career directions and opportunities. • Summer immersion programs, which train graduate students in group-based problem solving and help them acquire technical and time management skills, and The IGERT internship component brought the addition of new skills and expertise to the IGERT teams. Training and techniques learned during internships in national labs, international laboratories, and private companies were brought back and shared with other students and scientists at home universities. This information sharing spurred new discoveries, accelerated thesis research, and supported new collaborative efforts between research groups. The summer immersion programs have thrived and now are marketed as the Graduate Internship Program to prospective students. There are now 5 different tracks in the program, each with a particular sequence of immersion classes focused on the application of fundamental science in a specific economic cluster in Oregon. Seventy plus graduate students attend these tracks each summer, with about 60 students, focused on Masters degrees, seeking internships after completing required course work and 10 Ph.D. traditional students. About 80% of the masters track students turn down full ride Ph.D. programs to enroll in the graduate internship program, because 100% of these student have received internships and following these internships, 90% plus have been offered full employment by their internship hosts. About 15% of these Master’s students are from underrepresented groups, attracted to the program by its successful record in preparing students for careers using science. The best Masters students are invited to continue their studies to the Ph.D., starting in the second year of the traditional Ph.D. program. This track has significantly improved the diversity of our Ph.D. program in Chemistry. The discoveries and innovations of the IGERT fellows are a continuing legacy of the program, spawning new research areas, companies, and centers. Collaboration between IGERT fellows from the Keszler, DW Johnson, Wager, DC Johnson and Cohen research groups resulted in the ability to prepare a wide variety of pin-hole free, ultrathin inorganic oxide films from aqueous solutions. The key fundamental discovery was eliminating concentration gradients while adjusting pH resulted in completely new, chemically labile inorganic clusters that readily condense to form amorphous oxides. A start-up company based on this chemistry, Inpria, now employees several IGERT alumni. A pair of IGERT fellows, working in the research group of Shih-Yuan Liu, discovered a method to prepare a broad family of aromatic six-membered BN heterocycles, including the simplest member of the family, 1,2-dihydro-1,2-azaborine. This has opened up a host of potential applications and spawned a start-up company. Collaborating IGERT fellows in the laboratory of DC Johnson discovered a general synthetic strategy to prepare over 20,000 new kinetically stable compounds consisting of interwoven structural units of known binary and ternary compounds with precise control of the size of each constituent and their relative order. Understanding why these compounds self assemble and how to predict the properties of 20,000 potential compounds by extrapolating the properties of a much smaller sample set is currently a major focus of research in the Johnson group. Key Words: Materials Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Physical Sciences, University-industry partnerships
