IGERT: Nanostructural Materials and Devices

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This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional graduate training program of education and research at five New York City and state institutions, resulting in Ph.D.s who are highly trained to conduct multidisciplinary research in areas of nanostructural materials and their uses in photonic devices. The Ph.D. graduates, because of the recruitment pool from which students are drawn, will be in large measure from groups that are historically underrepresented in science, engineering and mathematics fields. The mechanism that leads to the aforementioned outcomes involves City College of New York-working cooperatively with Hunter College and The College of Staten Island, as the City University of New York contingent-establishing a steady-state population of graduate students from which Columbia University and The University of Rochester will have the opportunity to attract and matriculate graduate students. There are five major activities that comprise this IGERT project: (1) interdisciplinary research and training; (2) new courses; (3) a new strategy for mentoring and advising students; (4) the use of video teleconferencing to facilitate research, education and communication between IGERT students and faculty; and (5) the introduction of enrichment activities that are designed to improve the prospects that students successful complete their degrees.IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to facilitate the establishment of innovative, research-based graduate programs that will train a diverse group of scientists and engineers to be well-prepared to take advantage of a broad spectrum of career options. IGERT provides doctoral institutions with an opportunity to develop new, well-focussed multidisciplinary graduate programs that transcend organizational boundaries and unite faculty from several departments or institutions to establish a highly interactive, collaborative environment for both training and research. In this second year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. This specific award is supported by funds from the Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (Office of Multidisciplinary Activities), for Engineering, and for Education and Human Resources.