Matching funds support is requested from the National Science Foundation to defray approximately 45% of the cost to acquire instrumentation that is vital for the development of a state-of-the-art scientific imaging facility at Ohio University. The facility is to be located in space that has been newly renovated for this purpose. It will upgrade and replace aging and obsolete light, transmission-, and scanning electron microscopy equipment, and utilize the newly emerging generation of digital and video technology to resolve, capture, store, process, transmit and print high quality scientific data. The facility will be used extensively by the authors of this proposal, and by numerous additional senior personnel and their graduate research groups to expand the parameters of present research programs and to initiate new projects that are possible only with the support of this multiplicity of newly emerging technologies. The proposed facility will be available to researchers throughout Ohio University and to their collaborators. We currently have no facility with the resources and flexibility to satisfy the specialized requirements of such a diverse array of research programs, and the combined capabilities of the proposed facility are presently not available at Ohio University or elsewhere in the southeastern Ohio region. By bringing together in a single centrally-located laboratory all of the imaging requirements for a broad spectrum of productive research programs, we will be able to establish a center for the support of ongoing research, for the development of innovative new research initiatives, and for the comprehensive training of future generations of scientific researchers.
