This three year REU Site program at the University of Illinois at Chicago will engage eleven undergraduate students each summer in cutting-edge research projects in novel advanced materials systems in engineering. Specific projects will include independent research in materials science, bioengineering, biomedical engineering and nanotechnology. The participants' research experience will be broadened by their participation in the following complementary program activities: 1) oral communication and technical writing seminars; 2) tutorials on experimental design and safety engineering; and 3) introductions to recent developments and state-of-the-art science and technology.
Students will be recruited from regional community colleges, universities with high minority enrollments (i.e. Chicago State and the University of Puerto Rico) and universities across the nation. The program aims to have 80% participation from students belonging to underrepresented groups and minorities. This REU program will expand participants' creativity, motivate them to consider graduate programs and promote interdisciplinary technical skills needed in the future engineering workplace.
"This site is co-funded by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program."
PI: Christos G. Takoudis University of Illinois Chicago September 22, 2011 The goal is a stronger and diverse U.S. workforce of scientists, engineers, and technologists as well as discovery across the frontier of science and engineering. This requires significant efforts to attract and prepare U.S. students to be highly qualified members in the global technical workforce, to support innovative research thereby enabling people at the forefront of discovery to make important and significant contributions to science and engineering knowledge, and to increase opportunities for underrepresented individuals to conduct high quality, competitive research activities. Objectives of this Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site include development and enhancement of the students' creativity and ethics in science and engineering, safety training in research laboratories, fostering the understanding of the research process and intellectual property, giving the students experience at writing and presenting their work, and uniquely preparing them for interdisciplinary collaborations in their future careers. In 2007-2010, our REU program included 33 undergraduates from the U.S. with a wide spectrum of scientific backgrounds. It supported research in areas such as atomic layer deposition of novel multifunctional nanostructures, broad dissemination of BioMEMS devices, biomedical pressure sensors, nanofluidics, hydrogen storage, atomic scale characterization of functional oxide materials, engineering green technologies, protein engineering, and multiferroic oxide thin film growth. (e.g., www.uic.edu/labs/AMReL/NSF-REU.htm). Outcomes, benefits and deliverables of our REU program included professional training on safety in the laboratory along with certificates of laboratory safety and waste management, tutorials on making oral presentations and writing technical papers, one-on-one interactions of the REU students with faculty and graduate students from several disciplines in an exciting scientific environment in novel research in emerging technologies and cutting-edge research, literature study on their research topic, hands on experimentation or modeling, weekly presentations on motivation, objective, status, and future planning of research, intermediate and final reports on research, visits of other research labs in the area, acquired confidence in working independently, application of the students’ own ideas to state-of-the-art research, planning and carrying out experiments in laboratories, submission of final reports/papers to the Journal of Undergraduate Research (JUR) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (http://jur.phy.uic.edu/ ) that are anonymously reviewed by faculty, and additional research manuscripts to other refereed journals for a grand total of more than thirty five research publications so far. Another important unique aspect of the REU Program was the continuous and intense cross-fertilization of ideas among undergraduates with very rich and diverse (academic, cultural, socioeconomic) backgrounds.
