"IRES: U.S.-Germany Collaborative Research on Self-Assembled Nanostructures"

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This program will provide a strong international experience for doctoral students at North Carolina State University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, through collaborative research projects and teaching with institutions in and near Berlin, Germany. The research project will focus on interdisciplinary studies of self-assembly of molecules on solid surfaces to form nanostructures. The German institutions involved will be the Technical University of Berlin (the lead institution on the German side), Humboldt University and the Max Planck Institute of Colloid and Interface Science (Golm, Potsdam). The collaborative program will involve 13 faculty members in Germany, and 15 doctoral students there. On the U.S. side the project will involve 12 faculty at NCSU and UNC-Chapel Hill, and will support visits by 15 U.S. doctoral students to Berlin, where they will spend a part of their doctoral study period (a minimum of 11 weeks) working in the overseas partner institution. U.S IRES Fellows will have a U.S. advisor and a co-advisor in the partner institution in Germany, and will continue working on their research project after return to the U.S. The German doctoral students will spend a similar or longer amount of time working in the U.S. host institutions; funding for the visits by German students to the U.S. is available from a grant from the Graduate College program of the German Science Foundation (DFG). The educational program will include course modules in theory, experiment and technology of nanoscience taught by faculty on both sides and made available by video transmission. Regular IRES seminars, in which faculty, students and postdocs give short accounts of their latest results, will be broadcast synchronously as video conferences. There will be an annual meeting of the participants, including German colleagues (students and faculty), to discuss results and to assess the program. The plan described here is the result of workshops & discussions held by the participants in Berlin and Raleigh.Intellectual Merit. The self-assembly of surface-active molecules to form various nano-scale structures on solid surfaces (micellar structures on surfaces and in pores, thin films, patterned films, nanoclusters, etc.) lies at the heart of many biological and physical processes, but the fundamental principles of how molecules self-assemble to form these structures are poorly understood, making it difficult to predict and design nano-structured devices. This graduate program will bring together many experts from diverse fields and institutions to develop a fundamental understanding of such processes.Broader Impact. Improved understanding of directed self-assembly will impact many important technologies, including microelectronics, chemical and biological sensors, photonics, catalysis, drug delivery and medicine. The strong international aspects of the program address an important need in U.S. graduate education at a time of increasing globalization. We believe the international experience gained will have an important and lasting impact on the outlook and careers of the students. Recruitment of students from under-represented groups will be facilitated by our close contacts with North Carolina Central University (NCCU), a nearby (20 miles) HBCU, through coordination with NCSU?s AGEP/Opt-Ed program, and NCSU?s Women in Science & Engineering (WISE) program which is aimed at encouraging women to enter this field. Prior to departure the U.S. students will network with the visiting German students and will be encouraged to take the German for Graduate Students course offered at NCSU. Students whose research is in appropriate areas will have access in Berlin to the North German supercomputer network (at Konrad-Zuse-Institut, Berlin), and to the national synchrotron source BESSY, located at the Helmholtz-Zentrum in Berlin.This project is supported by NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE) and the NSF Directorate of Engineering (ENG), Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems (CBET).