This three-year REU Site program is focused in the area of particle-based functional materials. The overarching objective of this project is to develop a research experience for undergraduates program that not only builds a basis for research fluency, but also increases the students' ability to integrate knowledge. The specific goals of the REU program include: 1) Train students to perform increasingly independent research, specifically aimed at the multitude of technological applications that are impacted by functional materials; 2) Develop an integrated internship to cross-train REU students so that they can get not only a breadth of experience, but also an increased appreciation of the interconnectedness of the focus area; 3) Improve the students' ability to function in teams by pairing students for their internships; and 4) Increase the students' ability to integrate knowledge within and across the focus area via the research internship pairing and workshop series. In addition to the research projects, social activities will be largely coordinated by the Office of Experimental Learning that will aid in organizing these events to foster the cohort experience.
What are the broader impacts of the proposed activity? Recruitment efforts will target students from primarily undergraduate institutions and students from underrepresented groups. Research results will be disseminated at national societal conferences (AIChE, APS, MRS, and ASEE) as well as on the departmental web page (www.che.pitt.edu). Additionally, results will be published in both disciplinary and educational journals.
Our research experience for undergraduates program focused on what we call Particle-based Functional Materials (PFM-REU). The focus area is comprised of computational and experimental studies of particulate materials that fulfill a specific function, either because of their discrete nature or due to the influence of particles on structure. Such systems include: material self-healing, controlled delivery of therapeutics, "smart" catalysis, and particle separations, to name a few. Our REU was based on the premise that the successful engineer of the future will need to be able to seamlessly traverse the boundary between these seemingly disparate technology areas. In order to equip our students to become the "nimble thinkers" necessary in the changing economy, the PFM-REU program explicitly focused on enhancing students’ knowledge integration skills, while building their base of knowledge in a specific area. This was accomplished by combining the traditional research of an REU site with a tailored workshop series and an innovating "cross-training" internship. The chief intellectual merit of the PFM-REU program is evidenced through advancing knowledge and understanding across fields of engineering and physics as the students worked in their disciplinary reserach projects. The primary broader impacts lie in integrating teaching and research, and training of undergraduate students. Over the span of three summers, we have "graduated" a group of at 29 talented, diverse students that are able to engage in "broad thinking" within the realm of exciting research fields impacted by particle-based functional materials. The program maintained high academic standards and a high representation of minority and female participants. Specifically, the average GPA of our REU site- supported participants was 3.63/4.0, while the percentages of minority and female partic- ipants during the program period were 28% and 38%, respectively. Despite the fact that the request for proposal (RFP) under which we were funded did not stress representation from non-PhD granting institutions, 6 of the 24 NSF-supported students (or 25%) were from such schools. Student participants were followed post- program to provide documentation of their pursuit of advanced degrees and career choices by initiating a PFM-community on the LinkedIn.com (business) social networking site. A large proportion of the students who participated in our program entered graduate programs in engineering, natural sciences and medicine following the completion of their BS degree. Specifically, of the students that have thus far graduated, 83% (or 11 out of 14) went on to pursue advanced degrees at such prestigious institutions as MIT, the Royal Institute of Technology – Stockholm, UVA, and Michigan. There were particularly encouraging results from the target populations for the curent proposal. That is, every one of the under-represented students (3 thus far) and students from primarily undergraduate institutions (4 thus far) who have already completed their BS degree went on to pursue advanced degrees. Roughly one third of the students that have presented posters at national meetings have received awards (that is, 3 student presenters out of the 10 that have attended the annual AIChE meeting have won). Moreover, all of our participants have had valuable experience with over 40 poster presentations at meetings and symposia external to the University of Pittsburgh presented by REU participants. To date, the supported disciplinary and educational research has resulted in 4 peer-reviewed papers, one of which appeared in ACS Nano. Aside from the demographic, scientific outcomes and career assessments discussed above, the evaluation of our other assessment results has been both encouraging of continued program success (Figure 1) and indicative of a significant contribution from our novel "internship" practice (Figure 2). As a measure of the efficacy of the internship in building integrating thinking ability, we used a measure called "concept mapping" where students drew a quantitatively-scored map that indicated their understanding of the research being done. Interestingly, as seen in figure 2, while the map scores for year 2 (an "internship" year) improved from pre-to-post, the map scores from both years 1 and 3 (with no "internship") degraded from pre-to-post. We should note that the internship was cancelled in year 3 in order to test the robustness of the degraded pre-to-post scores. We expect that this degradation in student integrated thinking (in the absence of an internship) was due to a naive sense of "expertise" that is instilled in students that have a narrow (but deep) research experience. We believe that this is supportive of our continued focus on the breadth of our students’ experiences. This observation could have wide-spread implication for all "deep but narrow" research experiences, and should be explored further in the future in order to inform upcoming REU designs.
