IGERT: Soft Interfaces - Bridging the Divide in Graduate education (iBriD)

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This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award supports an interdisciplinary program at Syracuse University to train Ph.D. scientists and engineers that can seamlessly move between fundamental and applied research. Intellectual Merit: The overarching theme of the proposed research is the physics and chemistry of interfaces on a variety of scales and the manipulation of interfaces for guiding the assembly of novel materials with reconfigurable or bioactive properties. Students? projects will focus in one of three areas: biological membranes, biomaterials interfaces, and nanostructured interfaces. To meet the challenges of this interdisciplinary field, in-depth instruction in one of the four participating traditional disciplines (biology, biomedical and chemical engineering, chemistry and physics) is complemented by cross-disciplinary IGERT courses. Key traits of the educational program are: early engagement in research; development of effective skills for interdisciplinary collaboration and communication; use of shared laboratory facilities; and courses and seminars designed to train civically responsible scientists. The recently established Syracuse Biomaterials Institute (SBI) to which many of the IGERT faculty participants belong, provides unity to the effort. Collaborations with colleagues at UNAM (Cuernavaca, Mexico) Technische Universität (Munich, Germany), and Institute Curie (Paris, France) provide opportunities for research experience abroad.Broader impacts include the development of a diverse cohort of future Ph.D.-level scientists and engineers who are not only skilled at producing new knowledge in a highly interdisciplinary area at the forefront of modern research, but are also deeply committed to communicating their findings to the public and making their voices heard among policymakers. A cultural change in graduate education at Syracuse University is engendered through the blending of interdisciplinary and collaborative research training with instruction in science policy, science communication and ethics, drawn from the Maxwell School and the Newhouse School of Public Communications.IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.