MIRTHE, the NSF-sponsored Engineering Research Center for Mid-InfraRed Technologies for Health and the Environment, conducts a vibrant education and outreach program that starts at K-12 and culminates at the post-doctoral level. Here, we propose a new addition to MIRTHE's post-doctoral research and training program, i.e. the MIRTHE Post-doctoral Fellowship in Industry program. A small group of recent MIRTHE graduates will be competitively selected to conduct year-long, postdoctoral research on-site with MIRTHE industry member companies. The research projects are closely linked to the fellows,former MIRTHE research and strengthen the university industry partnerships arising from the joint work and the group of academic and industrial mentors tied together by the post-doc fellows. In addition to full time work in industry, the post-doctoral fellows will be assigned mentors at Princeton University; they will report twice yearly on their research to the entire MIRTHE community. The fellowships are competitive, with a strict selection process, and are tightly woven into MIRTHE's overall formal post-doctoral mentoring program. The post-doctoral fellows are appointed through Princeton University at the base salary rate; the hosting companies will raise the fellows, salary to the companies? rate and will fund the fellows research expenses; we estimate this to amount to at least 25% cost-sharing by industry. Intellectual merit MIRTHE is leading the development of an entirely new platform of trace gas sensor systems that provide high-performance, cost-effective, and networked sensing capabilities. These sensor systems are based on mid-infrared Quantum Cascade laser spectroscopy and excel through their compactness, autonomy, networking capability, and fast time response. They fulfill the application requirements of trace chemical sensing on the individual point sensor, urban sensor network, remote sensor, and regional scale. In doing so, MIRTHE addresses the important societal challenges of securing a clean, safe, sustainable, and healthy environment, clean air to breathe and accessible healthcare on the national and global scale. The here proposed MIRTHE Post-doctoral Fellowship in Industry program sends five or more highly qualified, competitively selected post-doctoral fellows to work on-site with MIRTHE industry members on MIRTHE-related research projects. Their high degree of engineering excellence will strengthen university,industry collaborations and will advance MIRTHE's mission and bold vision stated above. Broader impacts MIRTHE successfully trains and graduates a diverse and globally competitive U.S. workforce ready to assume engineering leadership for the 21st century. Since 2006, MIRTHE's post-doctoral training program has grown to encompass 9 current post-doctoral fellows with career aspirations in academia, government, and industry. Three fellows have already ?graduated? to long-term employment in academia. MIRTHE has a proven track record to reach out to groups historically underrepresented in science and engineering, and its researcher and student diversity consistently exceeds comparable national averages. The here proposed MIRTHE Post-doctoral Fellows in Industry program provides an outstanding opportunity to increase the size and improve the diversity of MIRTHE's post-doctoral researcher pool. The program will provide MIRTHE's graduates with additional training, skills, knowledge, and insights, and will make them more competitive in the job-market, hence allaying the gravest of our post-doctoral researchers, concerns about their career opportunities in the current weak economy. The program will attract specifically post-doctoral researchers interested in a career in industry and in starting up their own company. The post-doctoral fellows will also form key connections between academia and industry in MIRTHE's industrial/practitioner collaboration program, which develops prototypes of cost-effective, market-ready, mid-infrared sensing technologies; these technologies result in new profitable product lines and new revenue streams for important industry sectors.
