1.     What refinements to the 2009 Strategic Academic Vision are needed?

A focus on Materials Science and Engineering (MSE)

Two of the five research themes identified in the 2009 Strategic Academic Vision would benefit significantly from an increased focus on MSE.  These themes are Environmental Sustainability and Human Health.  Accordingly, we propose

•   the formation of an MSE graduate group that will educate graduate students and provide innovation in the fundamental and emerging areas of the subject;

•   strengthening and growth of the undergraduate major in MSE, to develop the skills that several international studies (e.g. see Refs. 1 and 2, and reports collated therein) have identified as central to technological advancement and economic prosperity; and

•   development of a minor program in MSE, in collaboration with colleagues in physics, chemistry, biology, bioengineering, mechanical engineering, and environmental engineering; relevant existing and planned MSE courses include nanotechnology and nanoscience, nanofabrication, materials characterization, polymeric materials, electron microscopy, x-ray diffraction, materials sustainability, energy materials, and semiconductor materials.

Because of the envisioned strong ties between the new graduate group and the undergraduate major, nearly identical proposal documents are being submitted on behalf of these two self-assembled groups.  The proposals differ mainly in regards to their description of aspirations and metrics.

The drivers for strength in MSE, and the unique attributes of MSE that can help to forge UCM’s evolving identity, include:

•   Existing and potential connections to

     -   Energy Materials (harvesting, transducing, transporting and storing energy)

     -   Self-Assembly (sustainable; uses much less energy than conventional materials processing)

     -   Quantum Computing (lower energy than conventional data processing; reduced instances of hacking, identity theft and consequent loss of productivity)

     -   Environmental impact of materials (sustainable materials and manufacturing processes)

     -   Biomaterials (connects both sustainability and human health themes).

•   MSE is a “central” discipline – a link between fundamental sciences (physics, chemistry, mathematics) and other engineering specialties (mechanical, computing/electrical, environmental, bio, chemical, civil). 

•   MSE is intrinsically a multidisciplinary, collaborative endeavor.  The current core MSE faculty delivering the undergraduate major have degrees and/or professional recognition in materials science and engineering, macromolecular science and engineering, chemistry, physics, and biology.  This breadth will be expanded in the proposed MSE graduate group; colleagues in other disciplines who have already agreed to join the nucleus of this effort will add further expertise in physics and chemistry; and new expertise in bioengineering, mechanical engineering and chemical engineering.

•   MSE is a natural home for the growth of research and teaching in nanotechnology.  Two popular electives in nanotechnology for UCM students across many science and engineering disciplines have been developed by an MSE faculty member.

•   MSE is a natural home for extensive characterization facilities, spanning the range of structure and properties, that serve not only the discipline but also users across campus and the state.  For example, UC Merced’s Imaging and Microscopy Facility, under the direction of a MSE faculty member, has been providing characterization services (optical and electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction) to campus users, industry (Hewlett-Packard, Grundfos), state agencies (SJV Air Pollution Control District, CAL-EPA), and universities (UCLA, UC Davis, Columbia).   With the opening of SE2 and move of all IMF equipment to one location, as well as increased campus support for centralized facilities, it is anticipated that internal and external users will grow.

Comments on Themes in the 2009 Strategic Academic Vision

•   Sustainability

     -   In general, this research theme has seen growth on campus.  It appears that objectives 1 (expanding role of SNRI) and 2 (establishment of MERI) are well on their way to being met, although objective 3 (establishment of a school of design) has not gained traction. 

     -   For the immediate future, it seems that our resources would be better placed in fleshing out the sustainability theme beyond SNRI (which tends to focus on policy issues) to programs that deal with sustainability solutions at a more foundational level (e.g. energy materials, and sustainable manufacturing processes).  Robust dialog between the policy perspective of SNRI and technically-focused graduate programs would be desirable.

•  Human Health

     -   It would be desirable to expand HSRI and the nascent Public Health program to new participants

     -   MSE faculty conduct research in air pollution that is highly relevant to the SJV, where 6 of 10 of the worst polluted cities in terms of particulate matter are located; they have strong ties with other universities and state agencies engaged in similar research.

     -   MSE faculty are engaged in other health related work, e.g. responsive biopolymers, biosensors, and scaffolding for regenerative medicine, that could leverage and/or be leveraged by other human health efforts on campus.

     -   School of medicine should be given a low priority as it is too expensive to build a school of medicine and a general campus at the same time.  Engagement of UC Merced faculty in medical school instruction (as has been rumored for San Joaquin Valley PRIME Medical Program) needs to be thought out carefully, to ensure that there are no surprises in regard to accreditation and infrastructure costs.

•  Cognitive Science and Intelligent Systems – This theme has grown beyond its initial base in CS and EECS programs.  Interestingly, one of the areas in which it has expanded is visualization as used in MSE modeling.  There would appear to be need – and scope – for expanding the program further.

2.   What are the important research problems or questions in your field(s)?

A global view

A recent report from an influential research evaluation provider (Ref. 3) envisages the 21^st century as an era of revolutionary discoveries in materials research that result in far reaching changes for society and how we live.  The authors note that Asian nations and institutions are clearly focusing their research efforts on new materials, and that there does not appear to be a similar commitment to this research on the part of Europe and North America — especially on the part of the USA which has seen its world share of materials sciences research papers not only fall by half in the last three decades but actually decline in output in the late 1990s and in the early years of the last decade. It is only now that the USA’s output of such papers is returning to the level of 1996.  “However, materials research in particular is closely tied to economic growth. Therefore, US and European Commission policy makers and elected representatives may wish to consider whether it is important, even vital, to make a larger commitment to materials research for the sake of future prosperity — even beyond that provided by the US National Nanotechnology Initiative and similar funding by the European Commission.”

         Even more recently, the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has recognized (Ref. 1) several contemporary reports from the USA and Europe, highlighting the importance of materials and materials research. These reports include the USA’s Materials Genome Initiative for Global Competitiveness (Ref. 4).  A majority of the fourteen grand challenges in engineering issued by the National Academy of Engineering require that materials and material systems with properties and performance superior to today’s materials be developed (Ref. 2).

         A clear consensus emerges on where materials have the potential to impact significantly on societal issues. These areas of significant impact are centered on sustainable economic growth, manufacturing, energy, healthcare and the environment – coinciding with the strengths in Sustainability and Human Health that UC Merced has been most successful at developing and that have the greatest potential for growth (see Question 1).  The reports also tend to agree on the technologies that will be required to realize these goals: they include nanotechnology and advanced materials.  There is also agreement on some of the generic requirements to advance the area such as modeling and simulation, as well as on research areas that are especially worth pursuing (areas of existing strength in MSE are in italic font):

•   advanced materials with novel or improved properties

•   development of rational approaches in the design of advanced materials or in their integration into structures and systems

•   inspiration by nature (eco-design, bio inspiration and use of natural materials,  polymers from non-petrochemical sources)

•   anticipation and control of the performance of materials during the life cycle (including self-sensing and self-healing); replacing scarce elements

•   inorganic materials for photonics and energy (e.g. energy transport, storage)

•   non-organic materials for advanced multifunctional microsystems

•   materials based on novel functionality though molecular organic compounds and polymers

•   meta-materials and nanostructured materials

•   functional and multifunctional oxide films

•   materials to support healthcare (biomaterials, stem cells, regenerative medicine)

Current Local Expertise

Within the current five MSE core faculty, we already have expertise in several of the above-listed themes.  Specifically looking at the themes of Sustainability and Human Health, we identify expertise that includes:   

•   “Green” synthesis; all-carbon photovoltaics (Vincent Tung)

•   Materials for energy transduction, transport and storage (Jennifer Lu)

•   Characterization of nanomaterials for energy applications, and of nanoparticulate air pollutants (Valerie Leppert)

•   Rational design of advanced materials through multi-scale computation (Lilian Davila)

•   Bio-inspired and natural materials (Christopher Viney)

The proposed MSE graduate group will expand this pool.  To date, commitment to participate as founding members of the group has been received from experts in:

•  Electrochemical energy conversion and storage devices (Min-Hwan Lee, ME)

•  Control of materials performance: wear and  lubrication; materials for extreme environments (Ashlie Martini, ME)

•   Materials for regenerative medicine; tissue engineering (Kara McCloskey, BIOE)

•  Characterizing biomolecules for development of artificial functional biomolecular structures and ultra-sensitive biosensors (Tao Ye, CHEM).

Further growth of this research talent pool will occur by recruiting additional members of the current faculty, and by new hires as detailed in Question 3.

3.   What resources are needed for your field?

Faculty Hires

•   Materials Sustainability – ensuring materials availability, or finding acceptable substitutes; minimizing environmental impact; materials life cycle development.

•   Solid state structure characterization – focus on x-ray diffraction and spectroscopy; develop in-house labs and capitalize on nearby synchrotron facilities.

•   Nanodevice Fabrication – provide a complement to Jennifer Lu’s and Vincent Tung's research, and teach semiconductor fabrication classes. 

•   Next Generation Solid State Memory Devices to complement Min-Hwan Lee’s work.  A  February 2013 market report by Yole Développement Corp. forecasts conservatively that the solid-state non-volatile memory chip market will see growth at an average annual rate of 46% in the next five years.(http://ebookbrowsee.net/yole-emerging-nvm-february-2013-report-flyer-lau...)

•   Biological Materials Engineering – biosensors and/or nanoscale materials from viruses and bacteria (search currently underway).

We hope that one or more of these can be senior faculty appointments.  It is worth noting that the existing senior MSE faculty were among the first UCM hires, and have been especially concerned with program building and service for the campus and school; there has been no addition to the MSE senior faculty since UC Merced opened its doors to students. 

Other Resources

•   Adequate staffing to support undergraduate research (grant writing and program management), student outreach and recruitment, and collection of data for assessment metrics.

•   Adequate computational and IT resources for

     -   research (e.g. a community cluster where the infrastructure and maintenance are supported by the School, but the compute nodes are purchased by individual faculty)

     -   developing and hosting online courses (one way for a small program to stay near the frontier, is to offer online resources in traditional areas of materials education, leaving faculty the ability to concentrate on emerging areas)

     -   robust internet and videoconferencing facilities to develop teaching and research collaborations with other institutions

•   Investment in adequate centralized spaces for functions that can be carried out efficiently through sharing by all disciplines that need them; examples include nanofabrication, synthesis, thermal analysis, mechanical testing, polymer and other soft material characterization, and microscopy (optical, electron, AFM).

•   Investment in adequate space for current and future MSE faculty.

4.     What national programs align with yours and what programs do you aspire to be like by 2020?

Unique Aspirations

•   A focus on sustainability threaded throughout the undergraduate and graduate curricula, and flexible integration with other disciplines on campus. 

•   A research environment that encourages and facilitates the transition from undergraduate student researcher to graduate student researcher, especially among underrepresented groups in the professoriate.

MSE Graduate Group

•   The core principles should be inclusive of the relationships between (1) structure, (2) properties, (3) processing, and (4) application/performance of materials.

•   Educate students in the evolving computational methods, characterization protocols and data management skills that will enable them to function effectively as the next-generation workforce as envisioned in the Materials Genome Initiative. 

•   Provide continuing education opportunities for people in the existing research and industrial workforce.

•   Incorporate and sustain interdisciplinary research and training into the program.  We will leverage courses from other disciplines to enrich our curriculum (and we will ensure that our courses are appropriate for other disciplines).

5.   How does your program help to meet important campus metrics?

Several influential, high profile reports (see references) point to the national and international need for accelerated growth in undergraduate materials teaching and enabling materials research.  There does not appear to be a “model” program that is held up as an example of what we might become, because no program is yet meeting these challenges.  The best we can do in regard to metrics, is to select those that are more universally recognized as indicators of excellence, along with those (e.g. diversity indicators) that characterize the sort of academic environment that we want to be known for.  In regard to the quantitative indicators of excellence, we aspire to placing in the top 10% nationally.

         While recruiting (retaining) graduate students in-house is traditionally minimized in favor of external recruitment, UCM can benefit from retaining well-trained undergraduates as we address the challenge of growing our graduate student numbers.  (This was a common practice at UC Davis during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the campus was expanding its engineering programs in terms of number of students and quality while at the same time experiencing difficulty recruiting nationally and internationally.)  Thus, MSE will not discourage its undergraduates who wish to stay in the area, often due to family/community reasons, from continuing on to graduate studies at UC Merced – although they will be informed of the benefits of graduate study elsewhere.

Metrics for MSE Graduate Group: Possible metrics include (as per NRC practice and UC Merced aspiration): percent of faculty with grants, successful applications for large, cross-disciplinary funding opportunities(e.g. MRSEC, STC), percent interdisciplinary, percent minority faculty, percent female faculty (currently 60% for the MSE undergraduate program), percent students receiving full first year support, percent first-year students with external funding, average annual PhDs graduated (correlates with graduate enrollment).

         We are less enthusiastic about using the GPAs and GREs of students accepted into the program as metrics (although many of our students evidence high ranking in these areas), since questions remain as to how well these numbers demonstrate capacity for success in graduate school.  It would be better to measure the output and achievements of our graduate students, e.g. how many papers they publish, weighted by the appropriate journal impact factors.   Also, a measure of our success will be provided by the ranking of the programs from which our incoming students received their undergraduate degrees.

We are not providing projected numerical values of metrics with the present document, because of uncertainties in assembling reliable data that fully describe the status quo.   We look forward to developing our quantitative measures of success as we establish robust mechanisms for collecting plausible input.

References

1.   Materially Better: Ensuring the UK is at the Forefront of Materials Science, EPSRC (UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) 2013.

2.   The Future of Materials Science and Materials Engineering Education: a report from the Workshop on Materials Science and Materials Engineering Education sponsored by the National Science Foundation, September 18-19, 2008 in Arlington, VA.

3.  Global Research Report: Materials Science and Technology (Jonathan Adams and David Pendlebury, Evidence Ltd, Thomson Reuters, June 2011).  ISBN: 1-904431-29-1.

This is the first Thomson Reuters Global Research Report to have a topical focus rather than a geographical one.

4.  Materials Genome Initiative for Global Competitiveness, National Science and Technology Council, June 2011.