REU Site: Particle-based Functional Materials for Energy, Sustainability, and Biomedicine

Today's advances don't happen in isolation, but instead occur at the intersections of two or more technologies. This is especially true in biomedicine, sustainability, and energy. The focus of this three-year REU Site: Particle-based Functional Materials for Energy, Sustainability, and Biomedicine, at the University of Pittsburgh, is comprised of computational and experimental studies of materials that fulfill a specific function either because of their particulate nature or due to the influence of particles on structure.

Such systems include: material self-healing, controlled delivery of therapeutics, “smart” catalysis, and particle separations, to name a few. This REU is based on the premise that the future engineer will need to seamlessly traverse the boundary between seemingly disparate technology areas. Toward that end the PFM-REU program explicitly focuses on enhancing students’ knowledge integration skills while building their base of knowledge in a specific area and training them to engage in product innovation.

The program aims to model a holistic admissions process that weighs non-academic factors that have been suggested as predictive of student success. By doing so, the program aims to expand the reach and impact of the REU Site and also inform all holistic admissions processes at Pittsburgh.

The goals of this 10 week summer program are to 1) admit a diverse and talented pool of 10 undergraduate researchers each year via holistic admissions techniques; 2) train these students to perform (increasingly independent) research over the course of their 10 week experience; 3) increase students’ ability to integrate knowledge within and across the focus area via the research-internship pairing and workshop series; and 4) prepare the students to engage in innovative product design. This is accomplished by combining the traditional research of an REU site with a tailored workshop series, a translation exercise, and an innovating "cross-training" internship.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.