MIRTHE Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Industry

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MIRTHE Post-Doctoral Fellowship in IndustryMIRTHE, the NSF-sponsored Engineering Research Center for Mid-InfraRed Technologies for Health andthe Environment, conducts a vibrant education and outreach program that starts at K-12 and culminatesat the post-doctoral level. Here, we propose a new addition to MIRTHE's post-doctoral research andtraining program, i.e. the MIRTHE Post-doctoral Fellowship in Industry program.A small group of recent MIRTHE graduates will be competitively selected to conduct year-long, postdoctoralresearch on-site with MIRTHE industry member companies. The research projects are closelylinked to the fellows,former MIRTHE research and strengthen the university industry partnerships arisingfrom the joint work and the group of academic and industrial mentors tied together by the post-docfellows. In addition to full time work in industry, the post-doctoral fellows will be assigned mentors atPrinceton University; they will report twice yearly on their research to the entire MIRTHE community. Thefellowships are competitive, with a strict selection process, and are tightly woven into MIRTHE's overallformal post-doctoral mentoring program.The post-doctoral fellows are appointed through Princeton University at the base salary rate; the hostingcompanies will raise the fellows, salary to the companies? rate and will fund the fellows researchexpenses; we estimate this to amount to at least 25% cost-sharing by industry.Intellectual meritMIRTHE is leading the development of an entirely new platform of trace gas sensor systems that providehigh-performance, cost-effective, and networked sensing capabilities. These sensor systems are basedon mid-infrared Quantum Cascade laser spectroscopy and excel through their compactness, autonomy,networking capability, and fast time response. They fulfill the application requirements of trace chemicalsensing on the individual point sensor, urban sensor network, remote sensor, and regional scale. In doingso, MIRTHE addresses the important societal challenges of securing a clean, safe, sustainable, andhealthy environment, clean air to breathe and accessible healthcare on the national and global scale.The here proposed MIRTHE Post-doctoral Fellowship in Industry program sends five or more highlyqualified, competitively selected post-doctoral fellows to work on-site with MIRTHE industry members onMIRTHE-related research projects. Their high degree of engineering excellence will strengthenuniversity,industry collaborations and will advance MIRTHE's mission and bold vision stated above.Broader impactsMIRTHE successfully trains and graduates a diverse and globally competitive U.S. workforce ready toassume engineering leadership for the 21st century. Since 2006, MIRTHE's post-doctoral training programhas grown to encompass 9 current post-doctoral fellows with career aspirations in academia,government, and industry. Three fellows have already ?graduated? to long-term employment inacademia. MIRTHE has a proven track record to reach out to groups historically underrepresented inscience and engineering, and its researcher and student diversity consistently exceeds comparablenational averages. The here proposed MIRTHE Post-doctoral Fellows in Industry program provides anoutstanding opportunity to increase the size and improve the diversity of MIRTHE's post-doctoralresearcher pool.The program will provide MIRTHE's graduates with additional training, skills, knowledge, and insights,and will make them more competitive in the job-market, hence allaying the gravest of our post-doctoralresearchers, concerns about their career opportunities in the current weak economy.The program will attract specifically post-doctoral researchers interested in a career in industry and instarting up their own company. The post-doctoral fellows will also form key connections betweenacademia and industry in MIRTHE's industrial/practitioner collaboration program, which developsprototypes of cost-effective, market-ready, mid-infrared sensing technologies; these technologies result innew profitable product lines and new revenue streams for important industry sectors.