REU Site: Chemistry Research Experiences for Early-Stage Undergraduates through Collaborative HSI Partnerships

This Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site award to the University of North Texas (UNT), located in Denton, TX, supports the training of 10 students for 10 weeks during the summers of 2025-2027. In this program, funded by the Division of Chemistry, early-stage college students will engage in highly collaborative and interdisciplinary summer research projects involving two or more faculty mentors with different expertise.

Students will be recruited through a network of faculty partners at primarily undergraduate Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) in the state of Texas. A special focus of the program is the training of partnering HSI faculty in collaborative mentorship skills. These HSI partners will continue to mentor students at their home institutions in the academic year following the summer REU program, while remaining engaged with UNT collaborators and benefitting from access to research facilities at UNT that they lack at their home institutions.

Involving students in a full year of collaborative research is expected to make them more excited about STEM careers and better prepared to tackle research at the cutting edge of important new technologies that benefit the nation.

Students in this REU program will pursue highly interdisciplinary summer research projects that draw on the expertise of a team of mentors, with topics ranging from joint computational/experimental studies of nitrogen and carbon dioxide activation by metal catalysts, to applications of machine learning in solvation and crystal polymorphism, to corrosion-resistant nanocomposite coatings, among others. Partnering HSI faculty will be encouraged to build on the collaborative research skills that they and their students gain in the summer program as they continue to mentor students in research over the following academic year.

The collaborative research training will be coupled with a professional development program focused on scientific communication, scientific ethics, and STEM career paths. The program is expected to contribute to a more ethical, collaborative, and creative STEM workforce, with enduring benefits for the economic competitiveness of the state of Texas and the nation.

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.