MUSE: Materials and the Environment: A Binational Partnership for "Eco-Materials" Research and Education

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For this MUSES planning activity, the University of Washington, in collaboration with Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, will undertake a set of workshops to generate a coordinated, binational plan for research and education in the area of the interaction of materials processing and use with the environment in our regions. The project will build teams on both sides, which on the faculty level, incorporate expertise in materials science, design for the environment, computational approaches to environmental modeling, and economics and social science. Significant roles for undergraduate and graduate students in the research and educational planning process are incorporated in the program design.The program will support two planning workshops, one in Seattle and one in Chengdu, in which the binational teams will come together to more fully develop the research and educational agenda. There are three main foci for the collaboration 1) Design of comprehensive regional industrial ecology models for the effect of the materials processing industry on the environment. The regions of focus for this study are the Puget Sound Region and the Sichuan basin 2) Creation of a collaborative plan for research on materials for fuel cells, with a particular focus on the transportation sector, and; 3) Collaboration on the more effective incorporation of environmental issues in materials science curriculum.As a concrete result of the workshops, detailed plans for ongoing partnerships will be generated which can be incorporated in proposals for more comprehensive funding to national research organizations in both countries, to private foundations, and to the industrial sector