The mission of the Wisconsin - Puerto Rico Partnership for Research and Education in Materials [Wi(PR)2EM] is to make transformative advances on a range of materials-enabled technologies, and to do so while broadening participation of Hispanic Americans in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Wi(PR)2EM will achieve these goals by developing synergies between research and educational outreach at University of Wisconsin - Madison (UW) and three campuses of University of Puerto Rico (UPR) (Mayaguez (M), Medical Sciences Campus (MSC) and Rio Piedras (RP)), with a particular focus on leveraging resources of UW's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) to achieve sustainable collaborations. Wi(PR)2EM will also leverage its multidisciplinary and multicultural research teams to develop a series of research-inspired programs that collectively define a pathway that recruits, retains and advances people from all stages of the pipeline (K-12 through faculty) into STEM fields throughout Puerto Rico and Wisconsin, with a focus on Hispanic Americans and women. This pathway emphasizes mentoring across the entire scope of the partnership at UPR and UW, which will be promoted through a carefully coordinated series of trainings and experiences. The proposed education and outreach activities leverage and build upon STEM outreach programs developed by the UW MRSEC Interdisciplinary Education Group and the internationally acclaimed UPRM Science on Wheels Educational Center. The PREM will expand the breadth of opportunities for K-12, undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty at both institutions, as well as the public in surrounding communities, with the long-term goal of creating a diverse and creative STEM workforce.
Wi(PR)2EM combines the shared vision and expertise of UW and three campuses of UPR to form multidisciplinary and multicultural teams that will make transformative advances in research involving a diverse range of materials. The three interdisciplinary research teams (IRTs) of Wi(PR)2EM bring together deep and complementary expertise in the synthesis, characterization, modeling and application of multifunctional materials. The teams will pioneer fundamental advances in atom-scale materials design and understanding, including atomically controlled bimetallic nanostructures and nano- or mesoporous materials for catalysis and separations (IRT1); amorphous and crystalline pharmaceutical materials templated from designer polymers (IRT2), and active and reconfigurable liquid crystalline soft materials (IRT3). The teams also integrate collaborators from national laboratories and industry. The long-term technological impact of the research to be pursued in Wi(PR)2EM is enormous, including nanostructured materials for chemical transformation of sustainable biological feedstock into commodity chemicals, new formulations of small and large molecule pharmaceutically active materials, novel chemical and biological sensors and assays, and hierarchically structured materials for separations.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
