$4.2M NSF Grant to Support Materials Research, Recruit Underrepresented Students

8/6/2024 · By Jenny Applequist · Illinois.edu

The award will support a collaboration among Illinois, Tennessee State and Fisk University.

TSU undergraduates Lennox Fletcher, Donovan Davis and Kyla Beddingfield, whose Summer 2024 research internships at the U of I were funded by the PREM seed grant that preceded the new award, pose on the U of I campus on August 1, 2024. Photo: Heather Coit/Grainger Engineering

A three-institution partnership of Tennessee State University (TSU), the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Fisk University has just won a $4.2 million, six-year grant under the Partnerships for Research and Education in Materials Research (PREM) program of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

TSU and Fisk are the biggest and the oldest historically Black universities in Nashville, Tennessee, and the new award will support a collaborative research and education partnership among TSU, Fisk and the Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (I-MRSEC) at Illinois.

The primary goal of the new award is to enhance the recruitment of underrepresented minority students from TSU and Fisk to materials-related graduate degree programs through mentored research and strategic programming.

“We’re very excited about this new grant, because it helps extend the activities and impact of the I-MRSEC program at Illinois by building bridges to two excellent partner programs,” said Harley T. Johnson, one of the project’s two co-principal investigators from Illinois.

The project, led by TSU’s Richard Mu, will advance materials science through collaborative research projects, particularly in the area of multifunctional nanomaterials and machine-learning-informed design. It will also support development of shared research facilities and computational infrastructure between Fisk and TSU; recruitment of new faculty to TSU; and addition of new degree program offerings. The program will provide educational activities in materials science, offer outreach programs, create exchange opportunities among the three universities for both faculty and students, and engage in student recruitment.

“This work will allow us to perform exciting materials science research with a team that has worked extremely well together in a prior grant,” said André Schleife, who is the other Illinois co-PI. “This matters because it leverages expertise from all institutions and brings together students and faculty to work on materials for potential new electronics and to integrate machine learning techniques into such research. I’m also excited about the broadening participation and recruitment goals of this project, to make our exciting materials science work accessible to a large cross section of the population!”

The grant is the culmination of several years of planning that started with a PREM seed grant received by the team in 2021.

I-MRSEC is funded by the NSF and is dedicated to fundamental, innovative materials research that has applications in areas of societal need while supporting interdisciplinary education and training of students.

Johnson is a Founder Professor of Mechanical Science & Engineering and the PI and Director of I-MRSEC; he also serves as Director of the new Illinois Microelectronics and Quantum Park. Schleife is a Blue Waters Associate Professor of Materials Science & Engineering, the Materials Research Laboratory and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The other co-PIs on the grant are Lei Qian of Fisk and Catherine Armwood-Gordon of TSU.