NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF MATERIALS--2011 HIGHLIGHTS
Materials in Focus
Metamaterial cloak hides underwater objects from sonar
(University of Illinois)
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Researchers have demonstrated an underwater acoustic metamaterial cloak, that renders underwater objects invisible to sonar and other ultrasound waves. The team designed the two-dimensional cylindrical cloak made of 16 concentric rings of acoustic circuits structured to guide sound waves. Each ring has a different index of refraction, meaning that sound waves vary their speed from the outer rings to the inner ones. The specially structured acoustic circuits bend sound waves to wrap them around the outer layers of the cloak. The cloak offers acoustic invisibility to ultrasound waves from 40 to 80 KHz, although with modification could theoretically be tuned to cover tens of megahertz. [Physical Review Letters]
Why some penguins wear a blue tuxedo
(Science NOW)
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The Eudyptula minor, an Australian penguin and the smallest of all penguins at around 30 cm high, sports a notable blue tint in its feathers, hence its common name, the Little Blue Penguin. Researchers have now discovered that nanometer-sized fibers in the bird's wing feathers provide the unusual blue hue. Made from keratin, the same material as human hair, these nanofibers are packed together in bundles. The penguin's color is due to blue light that is scattered when it hits the fibers, while all other wavelengths of light just pass through the feathers. This is a new mechanism for giving feathers a blue color, the authors say; similar nanofibers are found in the blue skin of other birds, such as Emus, but those fibers are made of collagen. What advantage the blue feathers provide remains unknown. [Biology Letters]
Quantum dots created from buckyballs
(Nanotechweb.org)
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Researchers have developed the first bottom-up approach to form graphene quantum dots smaller than 10 nm in size using fullerene molecules as precursors. The dots produced are all regularly sized and have the same shape – unlike those produced using top-down techniques. The quantum dots were generated by decomposing carbon-60 molecules at high temperatures on a ruthenium metal surface. The metal acts as a catalyst and causes the C60 to break down into carbon clusters. The researchers employed scanning tunnelling microscopy to observe how the carbon clusters diffused onto the metal surface and how they aggregated to form quantum dots. [Nature Nanotechnology]
Controlled nanoindentation of silicon at room temperature forms electrically conducting and insulating zones
(Australian National University, Canberra)
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Simon Ruffell and his colleagues at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, have reported in Applied Physics Letters the discovery of a novel method of room-temperature, maskless electrical patterning of silicon based on nano-indentation. Starting with the diamond-cubic S-I phase of Si , the method uses controlled unloading of the indentation pressure to determine the phases of Si traces made by nano-indentation. When the pressure is unloaded quickly, the resulting amorphous Si phase is an electrical insulator. Slow unloading creates a fine-grained polycrystalline zone containing a mixture of the phases consiting mostly of Si-XII with some Si-III. The researchers have shown that this mixture is electrically conducting. Boron doping, which increases the electrical conductivity of this phase, can be carried out during the nano-indentation step. So room-temperature nano-indentation alone, without traditional masking lithography or thermal treatments, gives researchers the “ability to directly ‘write’ conductive and insulating regions in crystalline and amorphous Si substrates,” the authors write in the paper. They further state that the elimination of high-temperature processing steps is “potentially significant for fabricating novel electronic device structures.' [Applied Physics Letters]
3D Mapping of Internal Nanoparticle Grains
(Risø DTU, Denmark)
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Researchers from Risø DTU in Denmark, working with colleagues in China and the United States, have developed a new technique based on transmission electron microscopy to obtain a 3D view of the internal structures of nanomaterials with a resolution of 1 nm. This is 100 times better than existing non-destructive 3D techniques, according to the researchers. As reported recently in Science, this technique, called 3D orientation mapping in the TEM (3D-OMiTEM), collects data based on conical-scanning dark-field imaging. By recording images at many tilt angles—more than 100,000 images may be required for one nanoscale orientation map—the researchers are able to simultaneously reconstruct a complete 3D orientation map of all grains in a sample.
The accompanying figure shows such a 3D map of the arrangement of crystals in a 150-nm-thick aluminum film. The crystals have identical lattice structure but different orientations (see labels 1 and 2). The colors represent the orientations of the crystals and each crystal is defined by volumes of the same color. Crystals of various sizes (from a few nm to about 100 nm) and shapes are shown with a resolution of 1 nanometer. [Science]
Fractal surface structure of lignin aggregates discovered
(Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Image courtesy of http://www.scistyle.com. Click image to enlarge.
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Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Georgia Institute of Technology have used the combination of small angle neutron scattering (SANS) and molecular dynamics simulations run on a supercomputer to determine, for the first time, the three-dimensional structure of lignin aggregates. It turns out that this biological polymer, which is known to hinder the production of the second-generation biofuel cellulosic ethanol, has a complex surface structure. “The surface is fractal—self-similar over three orders of magnitude,” says Jeremy Smith of ORNL. “So if you look at the 1-angstrom length scale, the 10-angstrom scale, and the 100-angstrom scale, it looks the same.”
Cellulosic ethanol made from grasses and plants has the benefits of being cleaner and more energy efficient than first generation biofuels; it also has the advantage of not competing with a major food source like corn to make fuel. However, producing cellulosic ethanol that can compete economically with gasoline is difficult because of lignin. “Lignin gets in the way,” Smith says of the polymer that comprises roughly 30% of plant cell walls. “It gunks up the system, preventing enzymes from hydrolyzing the cellulose.”
But the exact mechanism by which lignin interferes with the hydrolysis process could not be known until its three-dimensional structure was known. Previous attempts to determine this using electron microscopy showed the lignin aggregates as little white spheres—hardly enough detail to unravel the mechanism. But the extreme resolution made possible by ORNL’s Bio-SANS instrument revealed a highly convoluted surface with a surface fractal dimension of 2.62 ± 0.02 and an average lignin aggregate particle size of 1300 angstroms. Overlapping results from the molecular dynamics simulations confirmed that the surface morphology of lignin aggregates is invariant from 1 to 1000 angstroms.
“There’s some evidence that enzymes stick to the lignin and therefore can’t do their jobs in hydrolyzing cellulose,” Smith says. “We can use these models to try to figure out how enzymes might get stuck in them, and get a structural and physical idea of why it’s difficult to produce cellulosic biofuels.” [Physical Review E]
Flexible, paper-based photovoltaics can deliver high watts per kilogram
(Massachussetts Institute of Technology. See also the press release by David L. Chandler, MIT News Office. Photo credit: Patrick Gilooly.) Click image to enlarge.
Photo caption: Graduate student Miles Barr holds a flexible and foldable array of solar cells that have been printed on a sheet of paper
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Vladimir Bulovi? and his colleagues at MIT are trying to move away from the paradigm of large, heavy, rigid solar cells that must cover large areas of land to generate enough electricity to be of value. “What if we could make solar cells flap in the wind?” he asks. “What if we could make them the way trees are made? Trees do not have rigid leaves, they have leaves that are connected by stems, that are able to withstand the wind by simply twisting the leaf in the stem. Well, what if we could make a paper-like solar cell that is able to conform to the environment and hence, in the long run, reduce the deployment costs?”
Bulovi? answers his own questions in a recent paper in Advanced Materials, which describes his team’s successful efforts to create working, organic photovoltaic circuits on ordinary, untreated paper. Using a chemical process developed and implemented by his colleague Prof. Karen Gleason, also of MIT, they deposited the conductive polymer poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiphene) on uncoated paper substrates using the dry technique of oxidative chemical vapor deposition (oCVD) combined with in situ shadow masking. They succeeded with uncoated paper where others have failed by ensuring that their polymer actually formed a chemical bond with the paper. “Other techniques typically do not have a thin film that is strongly covalently bonded to the substrate,” he says. “A film that just sits on top of the paper flakes off when you twist and bend the substrate. This is not the case with our thin film electrodes, which after hundreds of bending cycles still strongly adhere to the paper, showing the same electrical characteristics.”
In a video available on YouTube, they demonstrate the flexibility of a paper-based solar cell by folding it into a paper airplane and measuring its current output under illumination. Similarly, the paper solar cell has survived 1,000 compressive folding cycles with little loss in performance. The researchers can even coat the paper cell with a moisture barrier and show that it works under water, or feed it through the heating cycle of a laser printer without damaging the solar cell.
Bulovi? believes that presently the most pertinent use for this type of solar cell would be in developing countries, where cell phones and other devices are catching on by the millions, but where some people may have to walk miles to another village to recharge their phones. Solar recharging stations could possibly be established more locally due to the ruggedness of this technology. Paper solar cells could survive the journey over bumpy, unpaved roads that would destroy glass-based solar cells.
And while their paper solar cells currently have a relatively low efficiency, Bulovi? believes that perhaps a new figure of merit might be useful: the number of watts produced per kilogram of solar cell, or even watts per kilogram per dollar. Adding in the cost factor, he says, “It appears that if you’re expecting a useful lifetime of a few years for your device, and if you require a power source that doesn’t weigh very much and can easily deliver a large number of watts per kilogram, our cells might be able to meet that need quite elegantly.” [Advanced Materials]
Sketching an Oxide-only Single-electron Transistor
(University of Pittsburgh News)
Using an atomic force microscope tip as the drawing stylus of a highly advanced Etch a Sketch?, physicist Jeremy Levy and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and HP Labs have succeeded in producing the first single-electron transistor (SET) made entirely of oxide materials. As reported in Nature Nanotechnology, the key structure of this “SketchSET” is an island only 1.5 nm in diameter located at the interface of lanthanum aluminate and strontium titanate oxide materials. The island can host a population of zero, one, or two electrons. It acts as the central element of the transistor, but it might also serve as the world’s smallest flash memory device, one qubit in a quantum computer, or a single unit cell in an artificial quantum material.
The SET is a three-terminal device, with a source, a drain, and gate coupled to a tiny conducting island. Electrons passing between the source and drain have to go through the island. Such passage requires the energy levels in the island to be aligned with either the source or the drain. This results in a pronounced peak in the conductance and a corresponding change in the number of electrons on the island. The physics for this is fairly well understood, Levy says.
What is harder to explain is the huge jump in the capacitance between the source and the drain when you put one electron on the island—a factor of 1,000 times the expected value. “We think,” Levy speculates, “that this one electron is interacting with the crystal structure—the unit cell of the strontium titanate—in such a way that it’s changing the dielectric constant not of just the region where the electron is located but in a much larger region.”
Another avenue of investigation for Levy and his colleagues is whether these tiny islands can be used as building blocks, similar to atoms, which can be arranged in a periodic structure to produce a new class of solid materials that he calls “artificial quantum materials.” He defines these as “materials where you can control, at the scale of single electrons, the interactions between neighboring electrons.” They could lead to new types of superconductors, or could be used to simulate condensed matter systems for fundamental studies of their properties.
Perhaps most interesting is the capability of these materials to analyze themselves. The SET is a very sensitive electrometer so it can be used to sense very small fractions of an electron charge. Levy and coworkers have also seen structural phase transitions in the material by looking at quantum field emission from transistor devices. “The SET itself can be turned around and be thought of as a local probe of the properties of this lanthanum aluminate/strontium titanate material,' Levy says. “We already have smart materials, but these are introspective materials—you can use them to understand their own properties.” [Nature Nanotechnology]
Filamentary serpentine layout is key to epidermal electronic 'smart skin'
(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. See also the press release by Liz Ahlberg of the University of Illinois News Bureau.)
Image credit: John A. Rogers, University of Illinois. Click image to enlarge.
Image caption: University of Illinois researchers can mount electronic devices on an ultrathin, skin-like platform that mounts directly onto the skin with the ease, flexibility and comfort of a temporary tattoo.
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“Narrow, wavy, and thin”—that’s how John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign describes the new “epidermal electronics” that he and his co-workers have developed for both monitoring electrical signals from the heart, brain, and muscles, and for stimulating muscles by supplying electrical signals. As reported recently in Science, they have fabricated elastomeric patches containing open, spider–web layouts of electrical circuits that have modulus and bending properties very close to that of human skin, making them easy to wear and potentially useful in sleep studies, neonatal care, and rehabilitation applications, among others.
The key to the flexibility and stretchability of the design is the “wavy” nature of the electronic circuits, known more technically as a “filamentary serpentine” layout, which consists of components with many large loops instead of shorter, linear circuit paths. “If you look at the designs that best match the properties of skin in our work, they involve the entire circuit consisting of this filamentary serpentine shape,” Rogers says. “So not only the interconnect wires but the devices themselves—the silicon itself, including transistors and the other device components, have this serpentine geometry.” Quantitative mechanics modeling was used to determine the optimal thickness of the filaments and the loop geometry for the best skin matching.
The result is an elastomeric patch less than 7 microns thick containing an antenna LED, a wireless power coil, radio frequency coils and diodes, a temperature sensor, and electroencephalogram, electrocardiogram, and electromyogram sensors to monitor the brain, heart, and muscle signals, respectively. The circuit is attached to the skin by van der Waals forces only, so no adhesive is needed; the van der Waals forces are sufficient to maintain conformal contact with the skin, withstanding normal body movements over periods of hours without cracking or delamination. The researchers have also experimented with commercially available temporary transfer tattoos that could conceal the circuitry and provide greater adhesion if necessary.
This technology is an outgrowth of the macro-scale stretchable electronics that Rogers’ group and others have been investigating. Earlier versions were just too thick (a few mm to a cm), with elastic moduli a few orders of magnitude too high to match the skin. “We’ve extended some of those design concepts that we and others have been exploring in stretchable electronics to an extreme, in terms of design, filamentary shape, thinness, and modulus-matched substrate to enable this epidermal format,” Rogers says. “We view it as a different class of technology for that reason, but it has historical origins in flexible and, more recently, stretchable forms of electronics.” [Science]
Electrically actuated single-molecule motor reveals chirality in STM tips
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts. See also the press release by Taylor McNeil of TuftsNow.
Image credit: Sykes Laboratory, Tufts University. Click image to enlarge.
Image caption: In this illustration, orange represents the copper surface on which the molecular motor is resting. The yellow ball is the molecule’s sulfur base, and the two arms are composed of carbon and hydrogen atoms. The power source above the device is the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope, which uses electricity to direct the molecule to rotate in one direction or another.
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In demonstrating the first electrically actuated single-molecule motor, Charles Sykes and his colleagues at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, encountered challenges in interpreting their data that led to another discovery: chirality in STM tips. Both of these results are important, but the latter discovery may have broader implications for the interpretation of data involving electrical contact with molecular systems.
As reported in a recent issue of Nature Nanotechnology, Sykes and coworkers were interested in finding a way to add electrical actuation of single-molecule motors to the already demonstrated ability to actuate such motors using light or chemical reactions. By adsorbing butyl methyl sulfide (BuSMe) molecules, which are prochiral thioethers, on the (111) facet of copper and applying electricity through an STM tip electrode at a carefully chosen spot in relation to a molecule, they were able to rotate a single molecule so that it advanced in one direction more often than the other, thereby qualifying it as a motor. Sykes says that mounting the rotors on a surface and using a scanning probe was the key to their success.
The researchers also expected to see every molecule of a certain chirality behaving in roughly the same manner. That is, all R-enantiomers of BuSMe should rotate with the same speed and directionality, each S-enantiomer should behave like every other S-enantiomer, and the R and S enantiomers should spin at the same speed but in opposite directions. This was not the case, however. “After collecting a lot of data we began to notice large differences between identical molecules in identical environments on the surface every time the STM tip was changed,” Sykes says. “We had originally assumed that as the tip hovers 1 nm or so above the molecule it just acted as a source of electrons, but our data told us something else.”
After many experiments studying the effects of the STM state on the behavior of the molecular rotors, they found that under identical conditions “some STM tips drove the right handed molecules faster and the left handed ones slower but more directionally and vice versa,” Sykes says. Upon reflection, the researchers concluded that it may not be unusual that the last few atoms through which the tunneling electrons pass in the tip will be asymmetrical. Hence, chirality is to be expected. This result illustrates the importance of the electrode geometry in the dynamics of molecular motion and electron transport. “We hope our work will have a large impact on the interpretation of data from many systems that require electrical contacts to molecules that are either chiral or become chiral in the adsorbed complex, including break junctions, nanoscale electrodes, nanopores, nanowires, Hg drop contacts, crosswire assemblies, and scanning probes,” Sykes concludes. [Nature Nanotechnology]
Materials Scientist Dan Shechtman Wins 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
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On October 5, 2011, the Nobel Prize Committee honored materials scientist Dan Shechtman of Technion in Haifa, Israel, with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry 'for the discovery of quasicrystals.'
Researchers discover a universal trend in metal oxide/organic molecule energy-level alignment
University of Toronto. See also the press release at the University of Toronto news website.
Image credit: Mark Greiner, University of Toronto. Click image to enlarge.
Image caption: Universal plot of HOMO offset (ΔEH) versus the difference of substrate work function and organic ionization energy (φ- IEorg) for a wide range of oxides. Inset: the equation developed to calculate the HOMO offset as a function of organic ionization energy and substrate work function.
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Much research has been done to understand the electronic band alignment between organic molecules and metal oxide substrates that are important for charge injection in organic LEDS (OLEDs), organic solar cells, dye sensitive solar cells, and catalysis. Now researchers at the University of Toronto led by Zheng-Hong Lu have observed a universal trend that emerged from a large scale study involving an extensive, broad range of metal oxides. As the authors write in a recent issue of Nature Materials, the trend demonstrates that “oxide energy alignment is governed by one driving force: electron-chemical-potential equilibration.”
Not satisfied with merely observing the trend, the researchers took an additional step to solidify the finding. “We turned to some classical thermodynamics and developed an equation that can actually predict the trend,” says Mark Greiner, lead author of the paper. The equation says that energy-level alignment (and hence charge injection) is governed by the ionization energy of the organic material and the electron chemical potential of the oxide substrate material. “The fact that energy alignment for so many materials can be expressed in one simple equation, based on basic thermodynamics, was a big breakthrough.” Greiner says.
The breakthrough was made possible by a comprehensive experimental approach. “Rather than pick one metal oxide, we picked as many as we could, as many as we could get our hands on,” Greiner says. “We wanted to try to find a global picture of what was going on.” These included oxides with insulating, semiconducting, and metallic properties. Co-author Michael Helander notes that all the oxides and organic materials they studied are “technologically relevant”; that is, they are currently being used in practical devices.
They used ultraviolet photoemission spectroscopy to determine the work functions, highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) energy offset, and organic ionization energies of these oxide/organic systems. The analyses were performed in situ to avoid sample contamination that might add uncertainty to the results. When they plotted the HOMO offset versus the difference between the substrate work function and the organic ionization energy for their large set of oxide samples, the universal trend emerged. After an initial steep positive slope, the plot plateaus at a value of the HOMO offset that represents the minimum injection barrier you can achieve. For practical devices, you want the charge injection barrier to be as low as possible. From this, the researchers determined that “You can change the oxide chemical potential further but there’s no resulting change in the injection barrier because everything becomes pinned at that point,” Greiner says.
“The quality of the data [presented in this paper] on metal oxide – organic interfaces (and on the properties of metal oxide surfaces) is unmatched so far in the field in my opinion,” says Mats Fahlman of Linköping University in Sweden, who has done much significant research in this field but is not connected to the University of Toronto group. “The paper by Greiner et al. conclusively proves the main points of the integer charge transfer (ICT) model using a much broader set of materials (of fundamental technological importance), gives a theoretical explanation as to why the chemical potential (not conduction or valence bands) is the key actor, and further provides a quantitative theoretical model for calculating the energy level alignment. All of this is in my opinion highly novel and important.” [Nature Materials]
Energy Focus
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Gold/Palladium Catalysts Create Useful Materials for Aromatic Hydrocarbons
by Dr. Russ Chianelli, The University of Texas at El Paso, Materials Research & Technology Institute
Researchers at Cardiff University in Wales reported that gold/palladium nano-particles are effective catalysts for selectively activating C–H bonds, allowing insertion of oxygen to create useful chemicals.1 The particular reaction reported was the reaction of oxygen with toluene to form benzyl benzoate.2 The Cardiff group, led by Graham Hutchings, has surprisingly demonstrated the important catalytic activity exhibited by normally inert noble metals such as gold.3 For example, they showed that gold/palladium nanoparticles would combine oxygen and hydrogen to form H2O2. This reaction has many potential useful applications in energy for fuels.4 One such hoped for reaction is the activation of the terminal C–H bonds of straight chain hydrocarbons, allowing the production of more useful products.
C&EN, “A New Feat for Gold Catalysts” 1/10/2011, page 9.
Government Agency Invited Article (brought to you by the Government Agency Subcommittee of the MRS Government Affairs Committee)
Government Agency Information Sessions a Big Hit at the 2011 MRS Fall Meeting
by Joshua D. Caldwell, Chair of the Government Agency Subcommittee of the Government Affairs Committee of MRS
As has become the tradition at the Spring and Fall MRS Meetings, materials science and engineering leaders from various funding agencies presented overviews of their research portfolios, provided insight into potential future opportunities, and discussed the mechanisms by which funding can be obtained. These sessions are traditionally held at the Fall and Spring meetings from 6:00-8:15 PM on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Following each talk, the speakers remain in the room to make themselves available for further discussion. While these talks have been well attended in the past, this meeting drew some of the largest crowds to date, with over 150 attendees at the start of the Tuesday night session.
The Tuesday session began with an overview by Dr. Linda Horton of the Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Science's materials science investments. Dr. Horton discussed in detail the various areas of DOE/BES that are involved in materials development efforts. In particular, she highlighted the upcoming Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) and the collaborative role that NSF, DOE and members of the DoD funding communities will play in its implementation. This Presidential Initiative is designed to reduce the time and investment needed to develop new materials and bring them to market through the combination of computational and materials characterization efforts with enhancements in manufacturing technology.
Following Dr. Horton's talk, a brief overview of the SunShot initiative was given by Dr. Elaine Ulrich of the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy division of DOE. This overview was immediately followed by a presentation from Dr. Shawn Thorne of the Office of Naval Research -Global division (ONR-Global). This was the first talk within these sessions that focused primarily on opportunities available to non-US based scientists and engineers. Dr. Thorne's talk focused on several possibilities available to foreign researchers that serve to both cultivate foreign research in areas of interest to the U.S. Navy as well as introduce these researchers to the broader ONR and Naval Research community. Based on the growth in non-US based membership within MRS, it is clear that highlighting opportunities for this demographic is imperative. The final talk of the evening was presented by Dr. Brian Holloway of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Dr. Holloway gave both an interesting overview of his scientific path, including stints in industry, academia, and now government, as well as an overview of the various successes, missions and potential future opportunities afforded by DARPA. One highlight involved a discussion of the types of game-changing ideas that are required for a successful DARPA proposal. Such insights are obviously one of the reasons that these Government Agency Sessions have seen growing attendance each year.
The Thursday session began with Dr. Ian Robertson of the National Science Foundation’s Division of Materials Research highlighting NSF/DMR programs and opportunities. Dr. Robertson focused on several areas of NSF investment and the various proposal forms and mechanisms available to potential PIs. He was immediately followed by Dr. Rosemarie Hunziker of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Hunziker provided an insightful view not only into potential areas for materials scientists and engineers to obtain funding and impact the biological and medical sciences, but also into the methodology of the NIH funding process. In particular, the differentiation between program managers and grant handlers was instructive in that it identified a key difference between how NIH and other agencies handle their grant submission process. Dr. Hunziker clarified the role of these two positions for the audience, stating that in contrast to other agencies, program managers at NIH do not play a role in the selection of proposals for funding. Instead, they act strictly in an advisory capacity to help identify the key scientific areas to be funded and to aid potential PI's in compiling and submitting the best possible proposals.
Dr. Hunziker was followed by Dr. John Prater of the Army Research Office (ARO). Dr. Prater highlighted the key areas of interest within ARO and identified the role of ARO in the full funding profile of the Army. In particular, he informed the audience that ARO serves only the role of funding basic research efforts, while the applied research efforts are handled by other agencies within the Department of the Army. He went on to highlight the four program managers within the Materials Science Division of ARO and their overall portfolios, with one of these program managers, Dr. Suveen Mathaudhu, attending the session with Dr. Prater.
The strong attendance and wide array of insightful questions from the audience further enhanced these sessions. In all cases, the program managers offered their time following the talks to answer any further questions from the audience, in some cases staying more than 45 minutes after the official end of their talk. MRS has expressed a strong dedication to providing its membership with direct contact with the various program managers and funding agencies to ensure that the best science is promoted and funded. These Government Agency Sessions are one such opportunity. These sessions will continue at the upcoming 2012 MRS Spring Meeting in San Francisco, California.
(The author of this article, Dr. Joshua Caldwell, is the current chair of the Government Agency Subcommittee and Organizer for the Government Agency Sessions at the Spring and Fall MRS Meetings. He is a staff scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and can be reached at caldwell.joshuad@gmail.com.)
Image in Focus
Wreath
Wreath-like pattern made by surfactant assembly on a silicon surface. Patterns like this one were formed after the drying of sodium dodecyl sulphate (dissolved in water) on the Si substrate. The sample was imaged using a Hitachi H2600N SEM.
Credit: Satish B. Chikkannanavar, University of Michigan--Dearborn
(Click image to enlarge.)
(An entry in the Science as Art competition at the 2011 MRS Spring Meeting)
From:Materials 360
