UTA team receives $4.2 million NSF materials science grant

Friday, Oct 11, 2024 • Jeremy Agor :

Stathis Meletis, Krishnan Rajeshwar, and Kayunta Johnson-Winters, from left

The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to a team of University of Texas at Arlington researchers to create undergraduate pipelines to graduate degrees in materials science.

Stathis Meletis, chair of the Materials Science and Engineering Department at UTA, is principal investigator (PI) of a $4.2 million award from the NSF’s Partnerships for Research and Education in Materials Research (PREM) program. PREM works with minority-serving universities to increase enrollment, retention and degree attainment for students who are historically underrepresented in materials research.

UTA co-PIs of the project are Krishnan Rajeshwar, professor of chemistry and biochemistry; Kayunta Johnson-Winters, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry; and Seong Jin Koh, professor of materials science and engineering. Mark Hersam, professor of chemistry and materials science engineering at Northwestern University, is also a co-PI. He Dong, UTA associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, is a participating faculty member on the project.

The new grant, one of just 11 awarded nationwide, will provide undergraduate participants with scholarships of $2,000-5,000 and will support doctoral students in their research. It is a result of earlier success with a seed grant awarded three years ago to Meletis, Rajeshwar, Koh, Hersam, and Ramon Lopez, UTA professor of physics. That project resulted in 25 undergraduates earning scholarships through the program, nearly all of whom entered the graduate materials science and engineering program.

“This new project builds on our success with a previous NSF seed grant in demonstrating a pathway for undergrad students to go into materials research and ultimately into graduate studies and postdoctoral opportunities,” Rajeshwar said. “We are especially interested in recruiting students drawn from underrepresented communities.”

The current grant will provide funding for a new set of UTA students to conduct collaborative cutting-edge materials science research and for them to participate in Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) projects at Northwestern University, where students will work alongside faculty and use Northwestern’s materials facilities at no charge.

“It has been proven that undergraduate research leads to better student success and retention,” Meletis said. “Exploration and creation make students excited about the things that they’re learning, and we are giving students in physics, chemistry, and engineering opportunities to work with graduate faculty here and at Northwestern to really dive into their interests in the lab and in class. The fact that we had such success with our last cohort shows that these programs work.”

Students in UTA’s PREM cohort will focus on two topics. One is next-generation microelectronics and nanoelectronics, which can develop memory that will eventually allow researchers to build materials for artificial intelligence (AI) that function like the brain and lead to faster improvement of AI. The other is the use of biomimetics and cell-free bioprogrammable biomaterials to build new polymeric materials.

“PREM is a tremendous program which is opening pathways for undergraduate students to earn science and engineering degrees and helps them go on to graduate studies,” said Morteza Khaledi, dean of the College of Science. “With their previous grant our UTA faculty and their colleagues have already demonstrated what a success the program can be, and now they will be able to scale it up and assist even more students as they pursue their academic goals.”

Since 2004, the NSF PREM program has broadened access to materials science-focused skills and opportunities by supporting strategic partnerships between minority-serving institutions and NSF-funded research centers and facilities at research-intensive institutions.

In addition to fundamental materials research projects, the new PREM awards will support specialized training and mentorship for students and early-career researchers, new research faculty positions, expanded educational outreach to local high school students and teachers, and other activities to build pathways for the future materials research workforce.

—Greg Pederson contributed to this story

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